EMarketer: 88 Percent Of U.S. Companies Will Market On Facebook By 2014

Aug 24, 2012 at 3:12pm ET by Matt McGee

In a new report, market research firm eMarketer estimates that 88 percent of U.S. companies will be marketing on Facebook by 2014.

That’s more than double the estimated 43 percent that were using Facebook in 2009, and would be up from the 83 percent that are estimated to be marketing on Facebook this year. (And significantly higher than the 17 percent of marketers using or planning to use Pinterest that we reported earlier today.)

Here’s the eMarketer growth estimate for Facebook marketing adoption:

emarketer Facebook chart

Facebook has been offering free Pages for businesses since 2007, but needing to increase its revenue, has recently been focusing more on creating paid marketing options. The latest of those is sponsored search results, and other recent paid marketing options include promoted posts. Our Greg Finn has referred to this as the “paid organification” of Facebook.

The company’s been successful in onboarding businesses of all sizes. In its first earnings call a month ago, COO Sheryl Sandberg announced that 11 million businesses have Facebook pages — that’s more businesses than have claimed their Google local listing.

Earlier this week, Kenshoo reported that marketers are increasing their Facebook ad budgets at a faster rate than their paid search budgets.

kenshoo-chart

And still, questions remain about the effectiveness of Facebook marketing/advertising. But questions or not, eMarketer’s data suggests that uncertainty isn’t stopping businesses from getting involved on Facebook in some way.

(Note: The eMarketer survey reflects companied with 100 or more employees and includes the use of any Facebook marketing tool, free or paid.)

About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Marketing Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the US. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGee

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