Organic Social
In essence organic social is the free activity – posting on your wall, posting to stories, sending DM’s etc. Organic also provides the content that users who follow your page/account can interact with.
Organic activity is used to create and sustain the community that emerges around your brand, and to offer content that increases leads and sales, and retains already existing customers.
Paid Social
On the other hand, paid social refers to all kinds of paid advertising on social media. This includes promoted posts, ads, campaigns that seek to increase followers, and more. In a more developed campaign, influencer campaigns and product tie-ins can also be considered part of paid social.
The question is often asked which is better to use to further your marketing reach, but it’s not quite that simple. Your paid and organic efforts must be integrated to gain the maximum results – You’ll get far more out of social activity by uniting these two strategies.
Here are 4 key reasons why integrating these two avenues is crucial for your business:
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1. Organic and Paid social media work to different goals
Organic posts help you build a social presence and open doors for interacting with potential and existing customers. This is where you’ll focus on increasing engagement, brand sentiment and customer satisfaction, as well as strengthening established relationships. Paid social, however, is ideal for brand awareness, reaching new audiences, driving conversions and boosting sales, which is why you often see social ads that promote new brands, products, deals and events. Both contribute to the customer journey in their own unique ways—and all of the above objectives are part of any good social strategy—so neglecting either would be a mistake.
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2. Organic Reach is on the decline
The social platforms have been tweaking their algorithms over time, making organic reach increasingly challenging for brands. To be blunt, organic reach today is next to nothing.
If you want to reach new, larger audiences (and also have a better chance at getting your content seen by existing followers), paid social is a must—and with the advanced targeting capabilities offered by many networks, ad reach potential is greater than ever.
But don’t underestimate the value of organic, either. It has a huge impact on your overall social success, especially when paired with ads.
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3. Organic insights can influence your paid initiatives – and vice versa
Your organic posts can help to shape how you should advertise on each platform. This is where your tracking comes into play.
Monitor things like page visitors and how they found you, your most engaging content, demographic information and more. These insights can tell you what content to promote more of, who to target and what ad formats to choose within each platform to generate the best results.
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4. Integrated paid and organic strategies lead to more concreted ROI
When businesses merge their paid and organic strategies, they’re in a better position to show the wider impact of their efforts. This can be helpful for making a case for a bigger budget, planning future social activities, or simply proving that your social initiatives are working.
All in all, paid and organic campaigns complement each other to drive results, so brands that don’t combine these strategies risk missing out on new customers, lead generation and conversions.
If you would like to talk to one of the Hi Ho team about how Facebook advertising can help your business, please get in touch!