With social media engagement hovering below 0.1%, networks showing more ads than ever, and organic social visibility in a continuous decline, social media does not seem like the lucrative marketing channel it once was.

However, user bases are growing, customers are using social to interact with brands, and most importantly, social is having an impact on purchasing decisions.

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All social media networks are not created equally.

While Instagram might be a powerhouse for one brand, it will do nothing for another – and while one business might have tons of engagement on Facebook, another business will gain more traction on LinkedIn.

With that in mind, how do you choose where to invest your time (and potentially ad spend)?

The best move is to have at least a presence on each of the major platforms, and from there, strategically choose which ones to double down on.

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One effective way to correct unhealthy social-media habits is to fast for a few weeks and then come back with strict limits on use — for example, as in the University of Pennsylvania study, a few minutes per day on any individual platform. That puts social media where it rightfully belongs: under each user’s control, and as a complement to real life.

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If you are not promoting your business on social media, you are asleep at the wheel. Here is what eight social media masters and Advisors in The Oracles told us about the channels and tactics that impact their businesses most.

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The way young people use social networks is changing rapidly, partly in response to networks that threaten to take over their lives, that they see as fake, the opposite of social. A while back, it looked like they were abandoning Facebook because it had been taken over by the old folks, but it now turns out they’re just leaving anyway, and not just Facebook, but the whole social media concept.

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The Facebook Cambridge Analytica revelations changed the way people in the US think about online privacy. And it should come as no surprise that many have grown wary over the mishandling of personal information.

Nearly a year later, a majority of US internet users said that Facebook sharing data with Cambridge Analytica raised some level of concern over how their information is used online, per survey findings from text message marketing company SlickText.

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On Monday, Facebook's chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, tested my ability to tell the difference between broccoli and marijuana.

He showed me two pictures of green blobs and asked if they depicted the cruciferous vegetable or the mind-altering plant. I guessed both were cannabis; I was wrong. One, apparently, was an image of tempura broccoli.

Unlike me, Facebooks content-filtering artificial intelligence technology can now determine which image is of food, and which is of marijuana, according to Schroepfer.

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In March, in the aftermath of the Christchurch shooting, I tried to distinguish between internet problems and platform problems. Internet problems arise from the existence of a free and open network that connects most of the world; platform problems arise from features native to the platform. The fact that anti-vaccination zealots can meet online is an internet problem; the fact that Facebook recommended that new mothers join anti-vaccination groups is a platform problem.

The recent rise in white supremacist violence around the world has given us fresh reason to ask which aspects of the problem belong to the entire internet, and which belong to our biggest social networks. It seems apparent that the internet is cultivating loose but potent networks of extremists. But what are the mechanics of this radicalization? And what role could platforms play in discouraging it?

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In  the summer of 2016, I gave a talk at a small tedx conference in northern Virginia. I began by admitting that I have never had a social-media account; I then outlined arguments for why other people should consider eliminating social media from their lives. The event organizers uploaded the video of my talk to YouTube, where it languished for a few months. Then, for unknowable reasons, it entered the viral slipstream. It was shared repeatedly on Facebook and Instagram and, eventually, viewed more than five million times. I was both pleased and chagrined by the irony of the fact that my anti-social-media talk had found such a large audience on social media.

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According to a 2014 survey by the United States Office of Minority Health, only 9.4% of non-Hispanic black adults received mental health treatment or counseling, compared to 18.8% of non-Hispanic white adults.

Clemons explained that one of the many reasons there is a stigma around mental health in the black community is that if someone can not deal with issues in church then the thought is that you don't have enough faith or you are not giving it over to the church enough.

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With an undoubtedly scrappy beginning, content is now a serious player in a variety of brand communications, ranging from demand generation to PR, and on to sales enablement. Especially as search becomes more competitive, it’s important to look beyond a single point of activation in order to make the most of your content. Integrating social media publishing with your larger content marketing vision can help you do that, engaging your audience and maximizing your content marketing ROI.

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Perhaps the most remarkable but little-remembered story of Facebooks rise to social behemoth is that from 2009 to 2012 it was actually a democracy. Facebook’s users could vocalize the issues affecting them the most and issues that attracted sufficient number of users could actually be placed to a formal vote, with the results legally binding on Facebook itself. While the reality was slightly less utopian, with limits on the kinds of issues that could be brought to a vote, the process was overall a genuine form of democratic representation by Facebook’s users in the sites governance.

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Social media is where a lot of us spend a lot time. Sometimes minutes, but more likely hours, a day. Whether your platform of choice is Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, much of our daily life seems to be spent checking out what others are doing.

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One of the biggest challenges in implementing an effective social media marketing strategy is time.

When I ask people about their social media strategy for their business, I often get responses like:

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