You’d better believe it.  No longer is social media a word only used by teenagers and hipsters.  Rather, social media has firmly secured itself in the interactive mix. In fact, social media will see the steepest growth of any existing marketing channel. According to Forrester’s US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 to 2014, a 34% CAGR is expected over the next five years as marketers invest to keep up with consumer’s increasingly social use of the web.

Therefore, more and more companies will be embracing social media as a viable tool in the arsenal. Not only is it a financially sound alternative to traditional methods in these tough economic times, but marketers today better understand the medium and will improve how they use social media to engage – not just reach – target audiences. This means more spend on multichannel social media campaignsinstead of just buying banners on community sites. Also of key importance to this trend is that social media types, tools, metrics and benchmarks are still very much under development. This means that many new measureable ways to apply social media are yet to unfold.

What does this all mean?  Unlike many forecasts, budgets will shift away from traditional media toward interactive.  In a word, advertising budgets will decline but marketing investments wont.  With dollars moving out of traditional media towards less expensive and more efficient tools, marketers will actually need less money to accomplish their current advertising goals.