Time for brands to start building a complementary social marketing strategy

A few days ago I came across Nate Elliott's blog post regarding a dramatic decline seen in organic reach of large brands' Facebook posts over the past year - which is now set to dip even further! Check Nate's article: Facebook has finally killed organic reach. What should marketers do next?

I could not agree more with the solution Nate is offering. It is time for brands to start building a complementary social marketing strategy. Marketers should stop making Facebook the centre of their social relationship marketing efforts and, instead, concentrate on building social hubs, aka 'branded communities', on their own sites as a more efficient method for deepening consumer relationships, encouraging brand advocacy and community ideation.

By embedding social media capabilities into their own branded sites, brands will:

1. Gain actionable intelligence which will serve as the foundation of marketing, targeted advertising, and product development efforts.
2. Build brand cohesion through messaging, design, and experience.

Some brands like Sephora and Cisco are already seeing success with their own efforts.

However, in my opinion, marketers can still benefit from using social platforms like Facebook for awareness building, new customer acquisition, and viral impact.