Earlier this year, we joined the legion of marketers who wrote about the death of organic reach on Facebook, and the cries of foul that followed. We’ve since heard reports of marketers pulling back from – or even abandoning – the platform. Some due to fits of pique about having to pay for ads and some due to a genuine misunderstanding of what the changes mean.

That’s too bad because there’s plenty of proof these marketers are missing out. Our experience over the past year shows that paid social advertising is more effective than ever in driving traffic to content, and has become central to any content amplification program we take on.  Long run, we believe this is bad news for the display ad business – even much-vaunted programmatic display ad buys can’t touch paid social on a cost-per-engagement basis.

Not convinced? This excellent white paper from social software developer Sprinklr provides both the business case for paid social advertising (on all the major platforms) as well as an excellent explanation of how to make the most of them.

Peter Coish is founder of KURATION.  He can be reached by email here.