Social media firms risk losing advertising revenue from UK businesses unless they do more to protect users on their platforms, marketers have warned.

Marketing and advertising is a key source of income for social media firms. Roughly 98 per cent of Facebook’s $16.9bn (£13.3bn) fourth-quarter revenue last year came from advertising.

“As professional marketers we need to carefully consider whether social media is the right place for us to use our marketing and advertising budgets,” Mocky Khan, London chair of CIM"

Tech giants have come under increased pressure to clean up their platforms in recent months amid concerns about harmful material, fake news and misuse of data.

Last month the Chartered Institute of Marketing urged businesses to “carefully consider” whether they should continue to advertise on social media, and as we know, given the option most people would choose to avoid intrusive ads.

Ad Blockers, Ad Skipping, and now greater control being exerted by the consumer over our data is now having such a huge impact on brands they are now looking to pull back (according to the article in the link below) on advertising spend, these are the companies who moved their 'advertise and promote' mentality into the global social media space with a KPI based on 'reach' to access 3.5 billion people, brands are now having to re-think if its really that great a strategy.

If you throw into that mix concerns around fake news, brands being associated with poor placement, and a forecast for $100bn in Ad Fraud by 2023 then the whole marketing industry is feeling some significant pain.

“The social sector is still expanding at a rapid pace, but growth has eased over recent quarters and has halved from a year ago,” said Warc Data managing editor James McDonald.

What we do know is that if brands were to stop thinking about 'advertising and reach' and thought about communities and engagement we might start to see a global adoption of the logic that is 'social buying', it would allay an awful lot of those concerns, and actually get them to start using 'social media' as a way of authentically connecting with you and me.

Social is about being social, the buying journey has already changed in both the B2C and B2B space, innovative companies who are using social to check out potential vendors, product/service providers are now adopting an un-gated 'content led' strategy, and the more evolved ones are also taking the time to 'listen' to what, and how the potential customer is saying.