B2B Advertising in Social Networks are Increasing

This article in eMarketer details that businesses will spend $40 million this year in advertising on online social networks this year alone, and according to projections the amount spent will increase to $210 million by 2012. The chart bellows highlights the expected growth over the next couple of years.

The need for B2B marketing has increased online because of the growing popularity of professional social networking sites like LinkedIn. Ms. Williamson mentions:
"Even Facebook has become a de facto B2B social network, simply because so many business executives have joined it in the past year."
Visa has already taken advantage of this growing business demographic on Facebook by launching the Visa Business Network for small business. It will be interesting to see the barrage of applications being built around the Facebook platform within the next couple of months.