Social media is where everything’s at. Whether you are discovering the latest news on Facebook, scrolling through some entertaining trends on TikTok or searching for inspiration on Instagram, there’s no denying that social media have become an irresistibly essential tool for businesses looking to connect with their audience, build their brand, and ultimately, drive their sales. There are two distinct paths that you are bound to stumble upon while increasing your screen time on social media: organic and paid. Each approach has its own set of benefits and challenges, making it crucial for businesses to discover the right balance that will maximise the impact of both approaches.
What is Organic Social Media?
Organic social media refers to the free content that you share on your social media platforms without any paid promotion, such as posts, videos, stories, etc. The content is distributed and seen by your existing followers and depending on their engagement, it has the potential to reach a wider audience. The primary goals of organic social media is to build and nurture a strong community of loyal followers, who choose to engage on a consistent and natural basis with your quality content.
Therefore, the strength of organic social media lies in its ability to create authenticity as a primary pillar for your brand. When you post organically, you share genuine content that reflects your brand’s values, mission and personality, which in turn helps establish trust and credibility with your growing following.
The benefits of organic social media are:
- Authentic Engagement: Allows for genuine interactions with your audience, as users tend to feel more connected to brand that are not constantly trying to sell them something in an aggressive and overdone way
- Cost-Effective: Since there are no direct costs associated with posting organic content, it’s a budget-friendly to cultivate and maintain your online presence
- Longevity: Organic posts, especially those that are highly engaging, can continue to generate interaction long after they are initially posted
- Brand Identity: Consistent organic content can help towards building and reinforcing your brand identity to your new and existing audience
However, there’s always two sides to every coin, and organic social media may sometimes pose certain challenges, such as:
- Limited Reach: Due to algorithm changes on platforms, organic posts can be hard to be seen be a wide audience without paid promotion
- Time-Consuming: Building an engaged following and consistently creating quality content requires significant time and effort
- Slow Growth: It can take a considerable amount of time to see substantial growth in followers and engagement rates organically
What is Paid Social Media?
Paid social media involves allocating a budget to promote your content or ads on your social media platforms, through various types of ads, such as display ads, video ads, carousel ads and sponsored posts. Paid social media campaigns are designed to reach a larger, more targeted and diverse audience than organic posts, going beyond your existing following, and thus allowing you to achieve specific marketing goals more quickly and effectively.
As a powerful tool for achieving fast and measurable results, paid social media requires financial investment and continuous optimisation as its key characteristics, in order to drive immediate actions and achieve more in less time.
The benefits of paid social media are:
- Enhanced Reach: Paid ads allow you to reach a much larger audience, including users that are not active followers of your page
- Targeted Advertising: You can precisely target your ads based on demographics, interests, behaviours and even specific actions during the customer journey
- Quick Results: Paid social media can drive traffic, leads and conversions much quicker than organic strategies
- Analytics & Insights: Paid campaigns can provide detailed analytics, allowing you to measure the effectiveness of your ads and adjust accordingly
Despite all these benefits, paid social media can also provide its limitations, such as:
- Cost: Running paid ads requires a sufficient budget, which can be substantial depending on goals and objectives of the campaign, as well as the competitiveness of the industry
- Ad Fatigue: Over time, it can be exhausting for users to keep up with ads, meaning they become desensitised to them, leading to decreased engagement and increased costs without the desirable results
- Short-Term Focus: Paid social media can be less effective for long-term brand building if not used in conjunction with organic content efforts
How To Find The Right Balance Between Organic Vs Paid
Both organic and paid social media have their distinct features, advantages and challenges, and finding the right mix between the two can provide you with a winning strategy that could significantly impact your brand’s success. While organic efforts build long-term relationships and trust between the brand and followers, paid strategies can drive immediate results and extend your reach. Striking the right balance is a delicate affair that must be handled with great care and precision, in order to maximise the potential of both for better results.
1. Set Clear Goals
Before diving into social media marketing, define your objectives. Knowing what you want to achieve will guide your strategy and help you determine the appropriate mix of organic and paid efforts. If your goal is brand awareness, focus on creating engaging organic content that resonates with your audience and use paid ads to amplify your reach. For engagement, prioritise organic interactions through regular posts, comments, and conversations, supplemented by occasional paid promotions. If your aim is lead generation and conversions, lean more on paid campaigns to drive specific actions, while maintaining a strong organic presence to nurture leads.
2. Understand Your Audience
Knowing your audience is crucial for both organic and paid strategies. Use analytics and insights from your social media platforms to gather information about your followers. Demographic details such as age, gender, and location can help tailor your content and ads. Understanding how your audience interacts with your content can inform your posting schedule and ad placements. Insights into what types of content your audience prefers will help in crafting both organic posts and paid ads that resonate with them.
3. Create High-Quality Content
Content is king in the world of social media. Invest time and resources in creating high-quality content that is relevant, engaging, and valuable to your audience. Consistency is key—regularly post content to keep your audience engaged. Use a variety of content types, including photos, videos, stories, and live streams, to keep your content fresh and interesting. Authenticity is also crucial; genuine content builds trust and encourages organic engagement, making your social media efforts more effective.
4. Use Paid to Amplify Organic Success
Paid social media can boost the visibility of your high-performing organic posts, reaching a wider audience and increasing engagement. Identify organic posts that are performing well and use paid promotion to extend their reach. Sponsored content based on successful organic posts ensures consistency and relevance. Additionally, use paid ads to retarget users who have previously engaged with your organic content, driving them further down the conversion funnel and increasing the likelihood of conversions.
5. Analyse and Adjust
Regularly review the performance of both your organic and paid efforts. Use analytics to understand what’s working and what’s not, and adjust your strategy accordingly. Track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as engagement rates, reach, conversions, and ROI to measure success. Experiment with different types of content, targeting options, and ad formats through A/B testing to find what works best. Listen to your audience’s feedback and adapt your strategy to meet their needs and preferences, ensuring continuous improvement.
6. Integrate Efforts
Ensure that your organic and paid strategies complement each other. A cohesive approach can enhance your overall effectiveness and ROI. Maintain a consistent brand voice and message across both organic and paid content to create a unified experience for your audience. Use organic posts to support paid campaigns and vice versa, creating a synergy that maximises the impact of your efforts. Combine insights from both strategies to inform your overall social media plan, ensuring a well-rounded and effective approach.
Whether you're just starting or looking to refine your approach, remember that the key to social media success lies in consistently delivering value to your audience while leveraging the right mix of tactics to achieve your business goals. Organic and paid social media can help you build a solid foundation and then push your reach and accelerate your growth, as long as you maintain the right balance between the two depending on your goals and long-term objectives.