• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, August 13, 2015

A new report from Forrester urges marketers to place their paid social budgets — which in many cases are growing sharply — with their media buyers. Currently, Forrester reports, over half of such budgets are handled by internal or external social teams.

That’s not a good idea, the researcher has concluded. For one thing, media buyers, which handle about a quarter of paid social budgets, according to the report, are more familiar than social teams with the array of ad models that social sites sell.

Also, social sites no longer promise relationships or engagement. Instead, they are pitching advantages like behavioral targeting and low cost-per-acquisition results. Media teams are more experienced than social teams at optimizing budgets for social platforms and offerings, Forrester argues. And they’re also more likely to know where to go for expert help.

Paid advertising is now the dominant form of social marketing, per the report, which notes that 80% of marketers’ 2015 social budgets are earmarked for ads on social sites. And more than two thirds of the 123 social marketers surveyed indicated that those budgets are up versus 2014.

“Marketers can no longer afford to isolate pieces of their media buying in swim lanes,” the report concludes. “Media buying is quickly becoming channel-agnostic and dependent on technology to allocate budget effectively across audiences in real time. Keeping social ad budgets with social teams creates inconsistency across audiences and fails to leverage real-time channel optimization technology.”

More on the report, “It’s Time To Separate ‘Social’ From ‘Media,’ can be found here.