In general paid search advertising should be used to supplement natural or organic search results. In regards to branded terms there is evidence that paid search will actually take away from organic results, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It depends on your goals and strategy for using paid search. For example, you can implement a strategy to advertise sales or special promotions against your brand terms that you can’t easily or quickly do with SEO.

From a brand awareness perspective, using paid search advertising on Twitter, FB and LinedIn could help depending on a users search behavior. These are ‘closed systems’ so you would necessarily see an organic and paid search result side by side. But if a user see’s your paid ad on Facebook and then later searches on Google for your brand name and your organic result is high, a user is likely to click on your organic search result because they recognized your brand name from the earlier Facebook ad.

This actually opens up a whole can of worms when it comes to user search behavior and  cross channel attribution. It’s a fascinating study that you are going to start hearing more about in months to come.