When retailers and other marketers talk about social media marketing, they’re really just talking about marketing, says Nate Elliott, a Forrester vice president and analyst. “Social networks’ ads aren’t social,” he says. “They’re just ads.”

What he means is that social networks like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter are increasingly focused on delivering ads that seek to drive direct actions via remarketing or other advanced targeting options. rather than focused on building relationships or driving engagement with shoppers.

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Despite the social networks’ strategic shift, most companies let the team responsible for producing and overseeing their social content handle their advertising on social networks. And that doesn’t make sense, says Elliott, who recently wrote a report that suggests marketers instead let their media buyers handle their social ad budgets.

“Social marketers might be great at social, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the advertising they’re running,” he says.

Advertising is where marketers are devoting the majority—83%, according to Forrester—of their social spending. That spending is on the rise; more than two-thirds of avid social marketers say they’ve increased their social ad budgets this year, including 29% who say they have added significantly more money to the channel. That’s because the ads are enticing; social media offers advertisers a ton of inventory—Facebook alone is expected to account for at least 25% of all U.S. display ad impressions this year, according to eMarketer Inc.—and those ads are far less expensive than ads on other platforms, Elliott says.

Media buying teams are experienced at buying ads and know how to work with external partners to make their ad buys efficient, Elliott says. That stands in contrast to social teams, 80% of which say they manage their social media marketing programs in-house, according to a recent Forrester survey.

Media buying teams produce better results, Elliott says. A Forrester survey found that 80% of social marketers who let their media team or partner manage their YouTube ad budget say they are satisfied with their YouTube advertising strategy, he says. By contrast, only 64% who let their social team or partner manage their YouTube ad budget say they are satisfied.

Social media advertising is essential for brands on social networks because organic reach is largely dead, particularly on Facebook where, in an average month, a brand will only reach 25% of its fan base via organic posts, according to a report by social media analytics vendor Socialbakers.

Despite the lack of reach, more than 80% of large global brands actively post to Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn and Instagram, according to another recent Forrester report that Elliott wrote. And they’re increasingly active on an array of platforms. Among 50 large brands that Forrester tracked:

• 96% are on Twitter, up 2 percentage points from a year ago.
• 90% are on Facebook, up 8 percentage points.
• 88% are on LinkedIn, up 28 percentage points.
• 84% are on Instagram, up 26 percentage points.
• 82% are on Google Plus, up 28 percentage points.
• 58% are on Pinterest, up 8 percentage points.

Brands are also posting more often to those platforms. For example, they post 18.3 times per week on average to Twitter, up from 17.5 a year ago, Forrester says. But as brands post more, consumers are engaging less often. For example, the average engagement rate on Instagram posts fell to 2.26% this year from 4.21% a year ago.

As those trends continue, brands will likely change their organic social media marketing strategies, Elliott says. “You can’t justify the time and resources it takes create unique content if people aren’t seeing it,” he says. “In the next year or two we’ll hit a tipping point where brands will focus on repurposing content for different platforms.” That may mean taking an image for an email marketing message and reusing it on Instagram and Pinterest.

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