Neural networks This State of the Industry Report, produced in partnership with Piano, explores how publishers engage with social media, specifically paid social media, what strategies they use, the challenges they encounter and how they plan to overcome them.
As social platforms become more fragmented and organic reach continues to decline, publishers and media companies are leaning more heavily on paid social to meet specific business objectives. But without clear, effective strategies in place, paid campaigns risk falling short — leading to missed goals, budget overruns and underwhelming performance. Determining the most efficient and impactful ways to deploy paid social is ever-critical.
To successfully manage paid social campaigns that deliver impact while separating publishers and media companies from competitors and providing value to consumers, teams need a strategic approach that combines leveraging data, testing and thoughtful campaign design.
“Generally, media companies don’t have a ton of money to spend on paid marketing,” Michael Silberman, executive vice president of media strategy at Piano said. “When they’re doing paid marketing, they’re looking for really efficient channels, and social is a really efficient channel. They can’t typically afford a big display or branding budget. Given the audience we’re talking to, it makes a ton of sense [they’d allocate significant spend] because it’s such an accessible channel for publishers to use when they have a specific target they’re trying to reach or a particular conversion goal they’re trying to achieve. So, it’s no surprise that a relatively high share of budget goes to paid social marketing.”
In this State of the Industry report, Digiday and Piano surveyed 105 publishers about how they engage with social media — what platforms and tools they use, how they determine what content to feature in paid campaigns, etc. — the challenges they encounter and the hopes they have for the future of paid social media marketing.
As Silberman alluded to, the majority of our respondents are allocating 21%–40% of their total media budget to paid social (62% said so), followed by 33% in the 1%–20% range, aligning with industry expectations.
“It’s great to see that paid social is no longer experimental — it’s foundational now,” said Craig Pentland, svp of client services at SocialFlow by Piano. “When we first started working in this space, there was a lot of hesitation around investing in paid social. Seeing how publishers are now dedicating real resources to it has been incredibly validating. It’s rewarding to watch paid social become such a core part of overall business strategy.”
For 2024–2025, 71% said their paid social budget has increased somewhat, while for 2026, 68% of respondents expect their budget to increase significantly, signaling paid social’s substantial role in publishers’ strategies.
Silberman attributes some of this shift to publishers no longer being able to rely on organic sources as they once could.
“They can’t count on getting the kind of traffic they used to from Facebook or Google,” Silberman said. “If they still have particular traffic goals to reach and business goals to drive against, they will need to shift toward sources they have control over, and paid media is the ultimate source you can control. You get to target the exact audience you want and drive it to the exact destination you want. Publishers are becoming more like other marketers who can’t necessarily count on organic traffic when trying to achieve particular marketing goals. It’s also not a surprise given the evolution in how platforms have been treating publishers for organic reach.”
Publishers are seeing a positive return on their investment, and because of that, they’re willing to allocate more money to scale further. And that’s one of the beautiful things about paid marketing: Once a tactic delivers successfully against desired goals, spending more money will produce more of those results.
As for how paid social budgets are allocated across platforms, 42% mostly focus on one or two platforms, 29% say allocation varies significantly by campaign and 28% have a balanced distribution across multiple platforms.
These strategies generally depend on publishers’ specific goals, and Pentland cautions against believing there’s a one-size-fits-all strategy.
“It’s important to be able to quickly shift between platforms based on your top KPIs,” he said. “Your campaign goal, who you’re trying to reach and the content you’re promoting all factor into that. We always encourage publishers to diversify rather than rely too heavily on one platform, so they can stay flexible and optimize as they go.”
The majority of respondents have a medium-sized social media team of 6–10 members (79%), followed by 17% selecting a 2–5-person team, 3% a team of one, and only 1% indicated a team of 20 or more.
For additional context, respondents were asked about their organization’s size. The most popular response was organizations with 51–500 employees (86%), followed by 501 employees (10%) and 0–50 at 4%.
“These results really show how demanding social media has become,” Pentland said. “Most publishers can’t rely on just one person anymore — it takes a small team, even if it’s not huge. At the same time, we’re not seeing fully-staffed 20-person departments either. A lot of teams are operating in that middle zone, trying to keep up with a constantly evolving space. If your team feels small compared to your goals, the key is having the right tools to streamline organic efforts and a strong agency partner to help with paid. That’s what helps publishers stay agile and effective.”
On top of this, it’s important to note that social media teams within publishers are responsible for organic and paid efforts, covering editorial and sponsored content, and any special projects, including partnerships. So, this can further split these teams’ attention, potentially explaining why some of these publishers aren’t able to execute on what’s needed to push the company forward.
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Channels and strategies
The platforms chosen for paid media efforts are rather wide, though nearly all (93%) selected Facebook — unsurprisingly — followed by YouTube (84%), TikTok (80%) and Instagram (64%). Snapchat and Reddit were at the bottom with 25% and 11%, respectively.
“Facebook paved the way, and Meta remains the strongest platform for reach, targeting, versatility and direct response attribution,” Pentland said. “We often recommend automatic placement campaigns on Meta because it identifies the users most likely to take action — eliminating the need to manually choose between Facebook and Instagram. YouTube is still valuable, but we’re seeing it lean more toward brand-building than direct-response. TikTok is rising fast and delivers strong, cost-efficient engagement. Instagram continues to be a top choice for driving interaction, especially through Stories, but overall, Meta and its associated placements still lead in performance and precision targeting.”
The tools our respondents are using to manage paid social campaigns are mostly social media management and automation scheduling tools, such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social (74%); analytics and attribution tools (GA4, AppsFlyer) at 64% and creative optimization and A/B testing tools (Canva, Smartly.io) at 62%.
For organic social campaigns, the most used tools are those for analytics and attribution at 67%, followed by analytics and performance tracking (Brandwatch, Rival IQ) at 61% and AI and automation (ChatGPT, Zapier) and community management and engagement tools (Agorpulse, Discord) tied at 54% each.
Notably, performance tracking isn’t at the top for paid efforts; however, this could be due to respondents considering analytics and attribution tools as essentially the same as analytics and performance tracking.
“Performance tracking is what we look at constantly and is the cornerstone of any paid strategy, so it’s surprising not to see that at the top,” said Pentland.
When selecting content to promote via paid social, 77% do so based on sponsored content promotion, 72% by performance of organic content and 64% by specific campaign goals. The lowest on the list, at 23%, was relevance to current events or trends.
“Sponsored content is both the content you’re promoting and the objective, which is driving the audience to the sponsored content, making total sense why those are high on the list,” Silberman said. “The next is looking at the performance of organic content and using that to build a paid campaign, which also makes sense. Typically, one of the things you look for is to combine both paid and organic to get a higher ROI on a particular campaign you’re running. If a post you’re boosting also gets some good organic traction, it just makes the campaign that much more efficient, so that’s obviously an important tactic, but the fact that sponsored content was at the top of the list makes perfect sense.”
As for using paid social to promote pieces tied to trends or current events, there are several reasons why this tactic is at the bottom for our respondents.