This week sees UK web advertising spend to hit £5bn in 2012 while US marketers continue to increase their digital marketing budgets, local Facebook pages outperform corporate pages in terms of engagement, will new voucher app Wrapp take off, Obama joins Pinterest and Samsung looks for bloggers to cover the London Olympics.

UK web advertising spend to hit £5bn
According to report by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) UK internet advertising spend is expected to soar to £5bn in 2012, mostly thanks to Facebook the social network is on track for an estimated 84%  revenue surge to £175m. An explosion in advertising on mobile devices and tablets as well as a doubling of online video advertising is also behind the increase in the digital advertising market.

Digital marketing spending continues to rise
It is not only digital advertising spend that is on the rise; according to a survey by Duke University, US marketing budgets are set to rise by 8.15 over the coming year. Most of it will be spent online, as digital marketing budgets are expected to rise 12.8% over the next year.

Local Facebook pages outperform corporate pages in terms of engagement
A study by Mainstay Salire has found that Facebook pages for local branches of a business generate greater reach and engagement than their corporate counterparts. On average, a Facebook post by a local division gets five times the percentage of fans as a post from a corporate page. Local post also see engagement from eight times as many of the fans reached compared to those from corporate pages.

The debate of what is best, local or global, has been going for a while now. Some brands choose to keep country specific pages going while other brands, like Heineken, have been bringing all of its pages together to create one global hub. Which one do you think works best? Or is it dependent on the brand? Savvy

Send vouchers to your Facebook friends with Wrapp
If you have a habit of forgetting birthdays and anniversaries, this new voucher app could be your saviour. With Facebook at its core, Wrapp enables you to send vouchers directly to your friends’ walls. Using their smartphone your friends can they grab the voucher and get money off at restaurants, shops and services. Not only that, Wrapp also notifies you of upcoming birthdays and lets you send paid for vouchers for retailers too if you so wish. Read more about what things Wrapp needs to sort for the service to work to its fullest potential on Shiny Shiny.

US President Barack Obama joins Pinterest
The social media savvy President – or should we say his social media savvy team, joined Pinterest last week and has already added over 11,000 followers. What does he pin about? Obama-inspired recipes, pet lovers for Obama, the first family, official Obama 2012 campaign merchandise and facts.

10.5 billion minutes spent on Facebook daily
According to Facebook, users spent an average of 10.5 billion minutes on the site daily in January, excluding mobile.  As Facebook has 845 million active users as of December 2011, this means each user spent an average of 12 minutes and 26 seconds on the social network.

China gets Pinterest clone thanks to Alibaba
Despite being behind a wall from the rest of the connected world, it doesn’t stop Chinese from joining on the latest internet crazes. It already has RenRen to compete with Facebook, Sina Weibo to substitute Twitter and now Fa Xian, a social shopping platform that bears a lot of resemblance to Pinterest. According to Reuters, four weeks in, the site (which is in beta) is attracting up to 60,000 unique visitors a day. It will be interesting to see how Fa Xian, which is effectively a marketing channel for ecommerce site Alibaba, will perform in the time to come. As one venture capitalist in China noted, “Over the long run, social commerce in China has the potential to be bigger than the United States”.

Samsung starts search for Olympic bloggers
Samsung is on the hunt for 100 bloggers to blog for them during the London 2012 Olympics as part of their Samsung Global Blogger programme. Winners will be sent to the Olympic Games to blog and produce daily content using Samsung products, including the new Samsung Galaxy Note.

Man who tweeted racist abuse user jailed for 56 days
The Welsh Twitter user who tweeted racist comments about Fabrice Muamba, the Bolton footballer who collapsed on the pitch a few weeks ago, has been jailed for 56 days for inciting racial hatred.