Social Is the Top Priority for Marketers in 2010

Money spent on social media-related advertising is already expected to grow significantly this year, and now we also know that the medium is considered the top priority in the digital space according to a survey of senior marketers.

The research, published today in eMarketer, shows that 45.4% of respondents considered social a ‘top priority’ while another 42.2% deemed it ‘important’. That narrowly beat out digital infrastructure for the top spot, with other marketing tactics like search, mobile, and blogger outreach trailing significantly. Here are the full results:

Elsewhere, eMarketer reports on the metrics that marketers care most about, and the results support the notion that the page view is declining in relevance. The data, which was collected in the second half of 2009, indicates that ‘time on site’ is now the metric marketers are most interested in, followed by unique page views, click-thru rate, and the traditional page view.

What does it all mean? For both the marketer and the publisher, that engagement is here to stay as the preferred way of doing business. That means both more engaging ads that leverage social media, and more engaging web sites that keep users around beyond a simple page view.