History Of Social Advertising: Timeline From 2002 - 2013 [Infographic]

Social commerce is becoming an increasingly popular topic as social advertising continues to become more apparent on all the social sites we love. Just to put it into perspective, in 2012, social media revenue topped out at $4.6 billion dollars. This number is expected to hit around $11 billion dollars in by 2017. This becomes even more significant when we think about the fact that social advertising didn’t even exist a decade ago.

It’s a huge testament to the effectiveness of social media and it’s influence over our buying decisions. I know some people reading this will cringe since they view social advertising as just noise that interrupts their social experience. As we pointed out just yesterday in an article here on Bit Rebels, it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a lot of value that can come from these types of promotions, if they are presented in a tasteful way, and if they offer value in our lives.

If this is a topic you are interested in learning more about, I found a few resources that you might find helpful. The first one is called What Lies Ahead For Social Advertising from the Adobe Summit 2013. The next one is an article called Why Social Media Advertising Is Set To Explode which was published on Business Insider last month.

This infographic called A Brief History Of Social Advertising (by Unified) illustrates a timeline beginning in 2002 and spanning all the way through June of 2013. It may feel like social media advertising has just recently hit a fevered pitch, but as you’ll see in this infographic, it’s been slowly creeping up on us for a long time. It will be interesting to see how this all evolves over the coming years.