Organic and Paid: How to Incorporate Both in Your Social Media Strategy

Sahail Ashraf posted on 21 June 2021

Organic posts on social media are still alive and kicking. There is only one problem with them. They don’t reach many people. That said, they still have a proper place in your social media marketing strategy, and are essential when combined with paid social. Paid social is advertising via social media platforms, and it has become so powerful now that it’s very hard to get by without it.

That said, organic adds value to paid media, and paid needs organic to maintain impact. To understand this, we need to look at the benefits of both.

Organic media

The big thing about organic social media is that it helps to build and maintain a connection with your audience. It does a number of things to make that connection real and powerful, but most importantly:

• It gives your brand a voice and establishes your personality
• Sharing valuable content with an audience helps build relationships
• It can be used to engage customers throughout their buying process
• Customers can benefit from it by receiving excellent, responsive service

You can have fun with organic social media posts. Your brand’s human side can be shown, and you can speak directly to customers and established audiences. 

However, organic also has its problems.

The biggest one is reach. Social media algorithms have made it more difficult to rank on platforms, and the share is getting smaller and smaller.

Paid media

Paid media does the work that organic can’t. Brands use paid advertising to have their content shared by social media platforms to targeted audiences. These audiences are suited to that content and even need to buy the product or service the brand offers.

This naturally means audiences will see paid content, giving it an automatic advantage over organic. And yes, it is paid for, but it is more effective. As long as a campaign is run well and monitored effectively, it should help a brand reach it’s KPIs.

Besides this benefit of targeted reach, paid also has another advantage. Used carefully, it can allow brands to reach new audiences that share similar interests to current audiences, and then convert them to paying customers.

Brands are making use of paid content now to:

• Increase brand awareness and attract new followers
• Describe the company’s newest deal, content, or event.
• Bring in new business
• Convert visitors into sales (including e-commerce)

Compared

First up, the biggest advantage of paid media is that it helps brands reach a larger audience. You also have that laser-focus on the right audiences, which are primed for the content you are promoting. 

With organic, it’s a different game. Here, you’re able to strengthen connections without the need to worry about conversions, and it’s great for building a brand voice too.

The perfect combination of organic and paid means you can use paid to reach a new, targeted audience, while building and maintaining relationships with that audience with organic.

Some pointers

While the combination of organic and paid seems quite easy to manage, it’s important to remember a few tips that can help you get ahead of the game. 

For example, with organic content you’re going to find that some posts resonate better with an audience than others do. They will have received the most Likes and shares. These could be boosted with paid. By using paid ads to boost organic posts, you have an ‘easy win’. You know that your audience engages with this kind of content, and you’re using paid to get it out to more people.

Another important piece of guidance concerns the audiences you approach with paid. Don’t forget that you are only trying to find more people who fit the description of your current audience. There are more out there, you are just using paid to reach them. Some brands make the mistake of ignoring the wealth of data they have on current customers and therefore miss a chunk of new audiences.

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