When I give advice to CMOs about new social marketing    strategies, I often hear the same initial response: But    nobody wants to come to my website. While thats probably    true today, cultivating an audience is just like growing your    audience on social media: it takes investment.  
    Brands have spent a decade investing time, talent and billions    of dollars in growing their    audiences on social media, only to discover that suddenly    they can no longer effectively reach themunless theyre    willing to pay for it.  
    Initially, Facebook took much of the heat, after changes to    its algorithm sent organic reach (the percentage of your    audience who sees non-promoted content) plunging to less than    two percent of the average brands    audience. Critics speculated that Facebook was using its    algorithm to bully brands into spending more money on ads.    Facebook argued the changes were crucial to    sustaining a positive user experience, noting that as many as    15,000 potential stories could appear in any of our News Feeds    every time we log on. But marketers remained skeptical, and    many talked of shifting their focus to Twitter, where organic    reach doesnt lie at the mercy of an enigmatic algorithm.  
    Then Twitter announced organic Tweet analytics. The new insights were    meant to help users maximize their organic Twitter impressions,    but they also revealed something pretty damning: despite the    fact that Twitters firehose model gives equal treatment to    every organic Tweet that crosses the platform, organic reach on    Twitter remains eerily similar to Facebook. So while the    volume of brand-related content being created  across    platforms, by both brands and consumers  has skyrocketed, the    volume of content actually being seen has plummeted because of    three irreversible trends.  
     Feed Frenzy: There are 7x as many users on social media than there    were five years ago. Each of those brands and individuals is    creating and sharing more content than ever before, and (thanks    to content marketing) were also talking more about brands. But    brands arent just competing with each other  theyre going up    against everything from wedding photos to breaking news to    (viral-optimized) cat videos.  
     Monetization: As media channels, social    networks are endemically flawed. The bulk of their revenue    eventually needs to come from advertising, and the combination    of increased demand for advertising, limited supply of    inventory (especially on mobile) and shrinking reach guarantees    that the price of getting your content in front of your    audience will only go up from here.  
     Fragmentation: New social networks are born    (and die) every year, and theyre only a small fraction of the    fragmentation problem. Chartbeat references "dark social"  things like    messaging apps, IMs and email that marketing software cant    track  as the number one traffic driver for content. Buzzfeed    sees more shares to WhatsApp than to    Twitter. Consumers have more ways to share and connect than    ever before, and its virtually impossible to measure them all.  
    In an ironic twist of fate, marketers have been very successful    at getting their audiences talking, but their ability to    amplify any of the resulting buzz has been eclipsed. The sheer    volume of content flowing through social networks at any given    moment has rendered brand messages all but invisible unless    theyre promoted. Social networks are no longer an effective    way for brands to reach their audiences  at least not in the    same way.  
    Many marketers have traditionally looked at social marketing as    something that lives on social media, often driving campaign    traffic to a Facebook page or app, for example. But as social    networks increasingly position themselves as paid advertising    channels, its time for marketers to start treating them    as such. This shift means using social networks to drive    traffic to your own properties. You can continue to use social    media for acquisition, awareness and viral marketing through    advertising and/or encouraging fans to create and share content    about your brand. Thats what those social networks want    anyway.  
    The difference is that instead of treating them like    destinations in and of themselves, you think of them like a    highly targeted media channel to drive traffic to your own    properties. Unlike social media (where youre basically renting    the space and the audience), when you shift your audience onto    your properties, you own the entire experience  the data and    the audience. In fact, your social experiences can better    reflect your brand with a content creation and distribution    strategy that you construct.  
Continued here:
The Urban Legend of Free Social Marketing