Only a few years ago, everybody was praising social media marketing as the greatest content marketing distribution channel ever. Did things not work out as beautifully as planned?

Companies sent their customers away from their pristine websites and over to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, where they pumped out as many messages as possible, only to find out that not too many people were content about their content. [7]

Then things went totally down the drain when Facebook started talking about “organic reach”, or the percentage of a company's fans who would on average see a company's posts, and then proceeded to slash said reach. [8]

As a result, companies turned to native advertising to push their content.