MUMBAI: Marketers in US are likely to ramp up their ad spends on social media as consumers increasingly spend more time online compared to traditional media, according to a recent survey commissioned by Vizu, a Nielsen company.

According to the study, consumers spend 20 per cent of their online time and 30 per cent of their smartphone time on social media-accounting for a whopping 121 billion minutes each month.

Around 89 per cent of the advertisers surveyed said they use free tools-such as pages, posts, likes and pins-75 percent say they currently invest in paid social media advertising, which includes tactics such as sponsored content, brand graphs and driving likes. In fact, 64 per cent plan to spend more on social in the future.

Social media ad budgets are small-but growing: Paid social media advertising is still relatively new. The majority of advertisers and agencies surveyed said they‘d been using paid social media advertising for less than three years. One-fifth (20 per cent) said they‘d only started in the past year. Plus, the majority (70 per cent) indicated that they dedicated 10 per cent or less of their overall 2012 online advertising budget to paid social media.

The ad mix will likely shift this year, however, as the majority of advertisers (64 per cent) plan to boost their paid social media advertising budgets. While the increases will likely be modest-primarily between 1 and 10 per cent-the growth is a positive sign for this young channel that hasn‘t traditionally had a dedicated budget. Currently, only 41 per cent of advertisers report having a dedicated paid social media ad budget. To fund the increase in paid social media advertising activity, the majority plan to pull budget from other channels-both on and offline.