Freelance job search engine DoNanza released its quarterly State of the Work-From-Home and Freelancing Economy this week which indicated that social media marketing is on track to surpass classic SEO and SEM.

According to DoNanza, social media marketing projects have grown by 67%, reaching 35% of projects in 2010, compared to 29% of projects in 2009. 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%.

“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.”

The report also revealed that social media marketing projects typically have higher budgets than SEM projects: the average social marketing budget was $1090, compared to $683 for the average Search Engine Marketing project.

The DoNanza repot also addressed project growth by network. As you might imagine, Facebook dominates social media projects (e.g. fan pages, app development, advertising) and Twitter follow but at a distant second. A good amount of project growth is happening at LinkedIn however which may provide a good segway into “social” for B2B marketers.

Some other interesting data from the report includes:

– the top requested skills on DoNanza were PHP, translation, HTML, Graphic Design, WordPRess, Website Design, MySQL, SEO, CSS and Photoshop.

– 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.

– Drupal is showing the highest growth rates of all CMS platforms quarter over quarter. WordPress continued to lead all platforms however, 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.