Social media once felt like the fastest and most effective way to reach your audience. But for many marketers, that momentum has stalled. Engagement is dropping. Boosted posts are delivering weaker returns. Despite testing new formats and following the latest trends, results are harder to come by.
This shift is not just about declining metrics. It reflects a deeper structural change. Platforms are increasingly prioritizing user content and paid placements. Organic reach is evaporating, and the spaces where brands once thrived now feel more constrained. This article explores why that is happening and why it is time to rethink where your audience lives.
What Is “Rented Land” in Social Media Strategy?
In digital marketing, "rented land" refers to platforms you do not own but rely on to reach your audience. Social networks like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube fall into this category. They are easy to access, often provide fast exposure, and have massive user bases. But the trade-off is real: the platform sets the rules, owns the data, and can change visibility, terms, or features without warning.
Imagine you built a beautiful house (your brand presence) on someone else’s land. One day, the landlord raises rent or rezones the property. Suddenly your foundation is shaky. That is what many brands are experiencing now. After years of investing in social media audiences, the game has changed. The algorithms and policies (the landlord’s rules) are limiting unpaid visibility and pushing pay-to-play models. The result is declining returns on organic social content and a need to rethink your brand engagement strategy.
Declining Organic Reach on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok
One of the clearest signs of this shift is the declining organic reach across major social networks. Organic reach refers to the number of followers or users who see your content without paid promotion. Across major platforms, that number has fallen hard.
Facebook and Instagram: Facebook's organic reach for brand pages has dropped from 16% in 2012 to about 1.65% today. Instagram, while slightly better, averages around 3.5% reach per post, with a continued downward trend. For a brand with 10,000 followers, only a few hundred may see a new post unless it is boosted.
TikTok: Once known for its generous reach, TikTok has matured and shifted. In early 2022, TikTok videos could reach up to 24% of an account's followers. By late 2023, that fell to about 10%. In one study, 85% of profiles saw their reach decline by as much as 50 to 80 percent.
Why is this happening? Three major reasons: platforms prioritize user content and ads to increase time spent on feed, content volume has exploded making attention harder to earn, and platform strategies constantly shift toward new formats like video. All of these factors work against steady brand visibility.
The takeaway here is that relying on organic reach alone is no longer a viable strategy. Where a post might have reached a large chunk of your followers a few years ago, now only a sliver see it organically. Declining organic reach on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok is forcing brands to re-evaluate how they engage their audience.
Rising Ad Costs and Dropping ROI
To compensate for lost organic reach, many marketers are turning to paid promotion. But advertising costs are rising, and performance is slipping.
CPMs on TikTok jumped by 19% in 2023 and another 8% in 2024. Snapchat saw a 47% increase year-over-year. Meta’s platforms, while more stable, also reported consistent growth in CPMs over the past two years. At the same time, engagement with promoted content has declined. A recent analysis found that average click-through rates on social ads dropped by 14% between 2022 and 2024 across most industries.
In effect, many marketers are paying more to reach fewer people, and those who do see the ads are less likely to interact. Boosting posts used to be a reliable way to amplify content. Now it often feels like paying a premium just to stay visible. The value exchange is shrinking, and more brands are rethinking how much of their budget goes into platforms they cannot control.
Why Brand Content Is Performing Worse
Even when posts are seen, they are getting fewer interactions. Engagement rates on social media have declined steadily across the board.
On Instagram, the average engagement rate for brand content is now around 0.5%. TikTok's brand engagement has also fallen, especially as the platform becomes more saturated.
These trends mean that even if a post is visible, fewer users are liking, commenting, or sharing. Brands are posting more, but seeing less in return. Many are forced to chase new formats, boost frequency, or rely on promotions to stay relevant.
Platform Volatility Makes Long-Term Planning Difficult
Planning for growth on social media has become increasingly uncertain. Algorithms change without notice, policy updates may limit how brands can engage, and features can be removed or reshaped overnight. Audiences also shift their attention quickly from one platform to another.
This volatility makes it risky to build a brand strategy around a single platform. When your ability to reach your audience can disappear overnight, it is time to reconsider the foundation you are building on.
Diversify Your Audience Strategy (Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket)
This is not a call to abandon your social media accounts. Social media still has an important role in most brands’ strategies. But it should be one part of a broader ecosystem. The smart move is to diversify and balance your owned vs. rented channels.
Use social media for what it’s best at and owned channels for what they’re best at. It’s an unparalleled discovery and amplification tool. You can use social platforms to get exposure, attract new people with engaging snippets, and participate in public conversations. It’s fantastic for real-time interaction, trend surfing, and broad awareness. Even brands that “de-platformed” themselves like Lush (which famously quit several social platforms in 2021) retained some social presence to handle customer service or spread news. Social media isn’t going anywhere, and it can drive discovery or traffic for you. However, you also have to balance social media with owned channels such as:
Email lists: Still one of the most cost-effective ways to reach people. Email lets you communicate directly, build segmented campaigns, and own your contact list.
SMS and messaging: These are high-intent channels where customers opt in to hear from you. Done well, SMS marketing drives strong response rates and conversions.
In-app communities: Some brands are embedding community directly into their product experience. This creates a space for users to connect, share, and stay engaged, all inside an owned environment.
Owned content platforms: Whether it is a blog, newsletter, or podcast, brands are investing in content ecosystems they own. These platforms help build SEO value and long-term authority.
This kind of diversification builds resilience. If a social platform changes its algorithm or your account gets throttled, you still have ways to connect with your audience. Better yet, you start to build stronger relationships. Owned channels are often where deeper engagement, richer feedback, and higher retention happen.
In short, shift your strategy from exposure to ownership. Social media is not going away, but your reliance on it should.
From Visibility to Control
Social performance is declining. Ad costs are climbing. The rules keep changing. But you are not stuck.
There is a clear opportunity to rebalance your audience strategy. Rethinking your reliance on rented platforms helps you build more control, more connection, and more long-term value. The brands doing this well are not abandoning social. They are building a better foundation underneath it.
And once you have that foundation, the next step is to make it portable. What if your audience could move with you, wherever your brand goes?
That is where we are headed next.
This is Episode 1 of the "Beyond Social" series, exploring why brands are rethinking their relationship with social platforms. In the next post, we’ll dive into audience portability and how to build a presence that travels with you.