How to Pair Organic & Paid Social Media Strategy

As paid advertising on social media becomes more and more popular, the algorithms deciding how content is delivered on social media platforms have evolved. Content is prioritized based on the perceived relevance of the content to the user, rather than being presented in chronological order. As a result of these changes, brands are seeing lower organic reach on social media than ever before. Brands used to be able to reach a much larger percentage of their follower base, but in recent years, the percentage of a brand’s followers that will see an organic post has dropped to under two percent. 

This decline in organic reach makes it more important than ever to utilize an updated social media marketing strategy to avoid losing out on prospective consumers. Building an organic strategy in tandem with a paid strategy is important to keep the brand visible and relevant on social media.

Below are some tips to ensure that your organic and paid strategies will complement each other to create an effective, unified social media strategy.

Organic Social Media

Although organic posts are not reaching as many people as they used to, they are still far from useless. There are multiple ways that the use of organic social media can be a great cost-effective way to develop community, build brand loyalty, and draw valuable insights about the audience.

Tip #1: Use Organic Social Media to Make More Personal Connections

While paid media is going to be the most effective way to get your ad in front of the most people, organic social media is a great tool to create meaningful interactions with your consumer base. Many consumers prefer to view organic posts showcasing the personality of a brand, rather than one that is overly promotional. Using organic social media as a platform to interact with customers on a more personal level allows the consumer to feel a sense of community, not only between the brand and their self, but also with the other like-minded consumers that interact with the brand. This sort of community can perpetuate brand loyalty, stemming from a feeling of belonging with the brand.

 

Tip #2: Nurture Existing Customers

Organic social campaigns can be used to effectively manage relationships with existing customers to maintain as many loyal customers as possible. While it is always important to be mindful of how to attract new customers, those that already participate with the brand are very important, and should be attended to as such.  Maintaining good relationships with those who already interact with the brand regularly can drive their loyalty towards your brand.  Even though a single interaction may not drive a conversion from these consumers, tailoring your organic social media presence towards these consumers can help ensure that your brand stays top of mind, which can lead to lifelong purchases from the brand, increasing their customer value.

 

Tip #3: Learn from Organic Posts

The way that people interact with and respond to your organic social media presence can provide valuable insights on how people would interact with similar paid media. Take note of which demographics are interacting with your organic posts the most. These demographics will likely be key targets within your paid strategy as well. 

It can also be beneficial to test what types of content get the best reaction on your organic page. Utilize different versions of content, and observe what consumers respond the best to. This will allow you to draw insights on what content works best before using up your budget.

 

Paid Social Media

While organic social media can be utilized to create meaningful interactions with the consumer base and to test content, paid media is critical to widen the reach of your content. As mentioned above, the reach of organic posts has gone down significantly over recent years, but many people do not know just how small of a percentage of their audience these posts get delivered to. With recent studies showing that less than two percent of an account’s following will actually end up seeing the post, advertisers have had to shift their strategies. While these posts can be impactful for the consumers who do see them, the number of people that will not be delivered this content is still exponentially higher than those who will. This is where paid media comes in. With the right audience targeting, a paid media campaign can vastly improve the visibility of an ad and drive conversions. Here are a few key points to keep in mind while building a paid media strategy. 

 

Tip #4: Use the Correct Objective for your Goals

One key difference between a paid ad and an organic post is that a paid ad can be optimized for a certain objective. These objectives can be to drive the most conversions, impressions, clicks, or more. Pairing the right paid objective with your organic presence should be a crucial focus when building out your social media campaigns. Check out our blog Reaching Business Goals With Social Media Objectives to learn more on this topic and implement your social media strategies.

 

Tip #5: Be Intentional about Audience Targeting

During the process of placing your ads in front of as many consumers as possible, it is still important to choose target audiences carefully. By doing so, you will be able to reach the most relevant consumers for your ad and get the most of your budget. There are three main targeting strategies many advertisers focus on with paid media: 

1. Interest-based targeting is one of the most popular ways of selecting a target audience. Interest-based data allows you to pick specific interests to target, prioritizing your spend towards consumers that are identified to have these interests.
2. Retargeting can be a very useful paid strategy to drive conversions. Use retargeting to reach consumers that have visited your website and did not convert, or to serve ads to loyal consumers that have converted in the past and will continue to do so. Since the majority of customers that have visited the website have some interest in the product or brand, a remarketing ad can help give the consumer that final push to convert.
3. Lookalike audiences are similar to retargeting audiences, but these consumers have not visited your website. Rather, these audiences are created by using data from consumers that have engaged in a conversion, and targeting consumers with similar virtual habits.

Being intentional about who your ad is delivered to and why it will help improve the performance of your campaign to get the most from your budget.

 

Tip #6: Use Metric Goals that Align with the Campaign Goal 

Social Media publishers offer many metrics on the performance of paid social campaigns. These paid metrics can provide more details on how consumers are interacting with your ads than you may have access to in organic social. Each metric offered to measure performance has its own intricacies and importance within a campaign, so it is important to set goals for the metrics that are the most relevant to your campaign and prioritize the optimization for those. For example, your primary focus for an awareness campaign may be total impressions, cost-per-1,000 impressions, or Click-Through-Rate, while a conversion-based campaign may have main goals for Cost-per-Action or Conversion Rate. Utilizing the right metrics can help test the effectiveness of your campaign based on the campaign goals. 

 

Using Organic and Paid Social Together

There is a lot that goes into building out a social media strategy effectively. Utilizing the tips above will help ensure your paid strategy lines up with your organic strategy to create an immersive social media presence to reach prospective customers, grow the audience base, improve customer loyalty, and drive conversions.

These statistics present a huge opportunity for marketers to engage with target audiences across multiple platforms. Whether you are an experienced brand social media marketer, or a  small business owner looking to connect with customers, understanding the top social media sites can be helpful. Knowing the differences between social media sites allows for marketers to modify social media goals according to different platform audiences; thus, increasing correct audience engagement.

In this post, you will see information about 7 social media platforms that can be used to market a brand in line with objective type.

 

1. Facebook

Facebook is a user-friendly platform that allows many forms of content including text, images, videos, and stories. It is the largest social media site in the world with approximately 2.45 billion monthly active users. This huge number almost ensures most social media users will be on Facebook. Marketing on Facebook introduces a pretty sound platform to reach a wide audience.  

 

2. YouTube 

YouTube is the largest video-sharing platform available. Its monthly active users rival Facebook at 2 billion. Because YouTube users spend an average of 40 minutes watching content on the platform, there are many opportunities to engage your audience. YouTube is also the second largest search engine, which gives an opportunity to expand SEO capabilities. 

Content thought starters for your YouTube channel:

• Informational Tutorials
• Product Reviews + Testimonials
• A day in the life of one of your employees 

 

3. Instagram

Instagram is a platform that allows users to share photos, videos, stories, and live videos. It is one of the fastest growing social media platforms and reaches 1 billion monthly active users. Instagram is primarily app-based, but can be accessed on desktop browsers as well. Because of the highly visual nature of the platform, it is very well-liked among younger generations. The wide range of people accessing Instagram allows marketers to target specific audiences.

Content thought starters for your Instagram account:

• Product photos + potential uses
• Employee day in the life takeover
• Create a relevant company hashtag
• Repost customer photos using the product
• Behind the scenes photos of company/office

 

4. TikTok

TikTok is a newly-popular social media network that consists of short-form mobile videos. Although newly popular, it already has about 800 million monthly active users, making it larger than popular favorites, like Twitter and Pinterest. Influencer marketing on TikTok is rapidly rising in occurrence and is a good way to start establishing trust with consumers. TikTok has a very specific user demographic which enhances targeting capabilities.

Content thought starters for your TikTok channel:

• Host hashtag challenges for customers
• Influencer partnerships showcasing product
• Educational videos that speak to target audience (ex. Workout video)

 

5. Twitter  

Twitter is a social media platform that provides real-time information on trending topics. At 335 million monthly active users, it falls behind some of the other top social media sites in terms of scale. However, Twitter boasts a highly engaged user base, allowing marketers to increase conversion metrics. Something to keep in mind with Twitter is its limitations on character length. Because it allows less characters in tweets than other social media sites, messages need to be especially concise in length.

Content thought starters for your Twitter feed:

• Real time company updates
• Links to company blog posts + other media
• Company generated or user generated memes
• News from other sources related to the company or industry

 

6. Reddit 

Reddit is a social media site that acts as a news aggregator for users to submit questions, links and images from different sources. It is an interactive platform that allows users to discuss submissions and vote them up or down. With 330 million monthly active users, Reddit has a large community broken into dedicated forums. Marketers can target these dedicated forums to reach specific passionate and diverse communities.

Content thought starters for your Reddit channel:

• Upcoming event reminders
• Business calendar with charted company news
• Generate queries and suggestions with brand subreddit 

 

7. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a professional social media site that has 260 million monthly active users. It is most common among a B2B audience because of the industry experts that make up its vast audience. LinkedIn offers many forms of advertising, such as the ability to display ads, send personalized ads to LinkedIn inboxes, and boost content.

Content thought starters for your LinkedIn channel:

• Tutorials
• How-to guides
• Blog reposts
• Podcast links from companies in the same industry

 

Closing Thoughts

These are 7 of the most popular social media sites that marketers should consider including into their mix. While your first instinct may be to use the larger social media platforms with a wider reach, it is important to keep in mind your objective and determine which social media source your target user is most active on. Quality over quantity folks!