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DoNanza, the largest search engine for work-from-home and freelance jobs, released today its quarterly State of the Work-From-Home and Freelancing Economy, looking at the fourth quarter 2010 and online freelance marketing project numbers for all of 2010.

Social media marketing is on track to surpass classic search engine marketing (SEO and SEM), reflecting social media's huge impact

Online marketing projects have become a necessary tool for many businesses. These cover everything from the "classic" lead generation and public relations campaigns - to newer forms such as search engine marketing and social media marketing.

The DoNanza universe data, reflecting projects for freelancers, shows the breakdown of the channels used by businesses for online marketing and the way these channels have changed in 2010, compared to 2009.

Marketing channel share of total project count

In 2010, Social Media Marketing projects have grown by 67%, compared to 2009. The Social Marketing share of all projects has grown to 35%, compared to 29% of projects in 2009. DoNanza data shows this trend will continue into 2011.

Social marketing is a recent addition to the online marketer's toolkit, resulting from the tremendous growth of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and the increased ability to target and segment potential customers. Although social media has been around for longer, Social Marketing became a mainstay of online marketing about two years ago. Social Marketing includes social advertising, running fan pages, social bookmarking, development of social applications etc, as marketers are trying to get viral in spreading the word about their product or service.

However, growth rates for search engine marketing projects remain high, at 33% compared to 2009, although their share of overall marketing channels has dropped from 44% to 41%.

Direct marketing like telemarketing and email marketing, viewed as old-fashioned marketing methods are at about 9% out of all online projects found on DoNanza. These methods seem to be here to stay.

"This shift towards Social Marketing indicates that businesses believe that the potential value of social marketing is higher than any other online marketing channel", said Liran Kotzer, CEO of DoNanza. "I believe there are many reasons for this: first, the huge number of people spending their time on social environments such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, and the fact that social networks are here to stay and people are learning how to use them for business. In addition, many social media campaigns are more visible and easier to measure and understand than some of the methods used for in search engine marketing. However, Search engine marketing is definitely not decreasing, quite the contrary. In 2010, it is still the largest in terms of projects available on DoNanza."

Social Marketing projects have the highest average budgets

Social Marketing projects typically have higher budgets than Search Engine Marketing projects. The average social marketing budget was $ 1090, compared to $ 683 for the average Search Engine Marketing project. "Social projects typically require more creativity and may involve application development and novel solutions for engaging with customers" said Kotzer. "In addition, since social projects are a recent addition, there are fewer experienced individuals that can take the job."

Facebook Dominates Social Media Marketing

As reflected in the chart above, Facebook dominates social media projects, with projects varying from the creation of fan pages to application development and segmented advertising. Twitter is number two with projects helping businesses to create viral marketing tools as well as customer communications and customer service.

Facebook and Linkedin marketing projects have grown the most

Compared to 2009, MySpace projects have dropped by 46% with LinkedIn and Facebook projects growing at 103% and 120% respectively. Twitter growth is smaller, reflecting the fact that Twitter projects tend to differ from other "classic" social marketing projects that involve applications, brand building etc.

Q4/2010 - The top 50 Requested Skills

Changes in Top 50 Requested Work-from-Home Skills Show a Rise in iPad and Android Development as well as healthy demand for writing skills

Notable changes in the list are the rise of "Social Media Marketing" discussed above, iPad development and creative writing and a drop in SQL and Xhtml projects. iPad demand grew by 86%, climbing 10 spots in the list. The average iPad development project budget is $1551, but the availability of experts seems to push budgets down, with a 11.5% decrease in the average iPad budget from Q3 to Q4.

Creative writing skills are in high demand, climbing 12 spots in the list with a 59% increase in project count. "Demand for at-home writing skills is definitely growing, according to our project data", said Liran Kotzer, CEO of DoNanza. "The availability of a variety of writing styles and projects, from creative to technical writing, means that good writers can obtain interesting and lucrative at-home work".

Groupon Clone Sites Reflected in freelance work projects

Groupon.com, one of the most notable developments in 2010, tremendously affected the freelance and work from home market. "We have seen hundreds of businesses wishing to create a clone of Groupon and other similar services such as livingsocial.com in their respective cities and countries. With an average budget of $1440 per project, barriers to entry in the daily deals and group coupon space, at least on the development side, are indeed low" said Liran Kotzer, CEO of DoNanza.

Drupal Showing the Highest Growth Rates of all CMS platforms

DoNanza data shows that while WordPress continues to dominate the market as a CMS platform, growth rates were highest for Drupal, signaling strong momentum for the platform.
WordPress continued to lead all platforms, with 6.3 times the number of projects compared to Drupal, and Joomla was a distant second, with 2.8 times the number of Drupal Projects.

Conclusion

The DoNanza work-from-home universe is showing healthy signs of growth with a 20% growth in freelance project count from Q3 to Q4, providing more people with the opportunity to make a living from home. "More businesses are posting more projects", said Kotzer "as the appreciate that many tasks can be done simply and reliably through online freelancers".