While social media isn’t completely mainstream yet, it has reached a certain critical mass. More and more marketers are looking into this new advertising model and growth in this sector seems inevitable.

Below are some graphs to show how South Africa compares to the international growth rate in the Social Media sector (based on Search volumes)

World wide one can’t ignore the the massive shift away from Direct Marketing and the huge growth spurt in Social Media.

World Wide
South Africa

Interestingly enough it seems that South Africa is a few months behind, but the trend as shown word wide seems destined to do the same. This means that South African consumers can expect a wide variety of brands soon invading their “personal space” as well as South African Digital and Social agencies (like ours) will see a large growth in business while the more traditional agencies will see a definite decline in direct advertising.

The big hope here is that the brands that enter the market realises that the central idea of the new age of advertising is not to interrupt your consumer with your message, but rather to co-exist no a shared platform for mutual benefit.