Social media is a powerhouse for marketers and social media marketing has an essential role to play in any modern integrated and comprehensive digital strategy.
According to SproutSocial:
- 93% of marketers use Facebook with 78% using Instagram
- 25% of ALL digital advertising spending occurs on Facebook
- Social media is now an overall bigger advertising channel than Google Ads
- 77% of B2B and B2C marketers use retargeting Facebook and Instagram ads
How you use social media for marketing purposes is important. It takes some consideration – and not just in terms of which social platforms are best to invest your time, energy, and budget into. More specifically, you need to determine whether you’re better served with an organic or paid social strategy – or a combination of both.
Organic vs Paid Social Media
Organic Social Media refers to a social strategy where you share “free” content (posts, videos, images, memes, blog links, stories, etc). You don’t pay to publish on social platforms, but this strategy takes time and an ongoing commitment to achieve tangible results in terms of sales and bookings. If you are willing to view it as a marathon rather than a sprint, it is a flexible option for boosting your reach and generating leads in the longer term, as well as building stronger customer relationships. Organic social is also widely viewed as a foundational part of every successful digital strategy.
Paid Social Media refers to paid, promoted, or sponsored advertisements on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social platforms. As a business, you pay for the advertising space as well as the reach of your content. It is a very powerful tool for increasing brand awareness with advanced targeting and guaranteed reach. The investment and saturation of paid social has grown dramatically over the last three years, as more consumers shop directly from the social platforms they prefer. Paid social is also a very effective way for brands to target new audiences and retarget existing followers.
Comparison of Benefits
Organic Social:
- Fantastic for nurturing the consumer connection
- Engages customers at every stage of the buyer journey, from initial lead generation to conversion
- Establishes your brand voice and identity
- Share inspiring, informative, or entertaining content
- Offers customer support and feedback portal
- Foster ongoing relationships for customer loyalty
- Content is visible to your followers and those they share them with
- Content is visible to all who follow your chosen hashtags
- May include user-generated content and influencer marketing
Examples of organic social content include:
Paid Social:
- Attracts new followers
- Raises brand awareness
- Generates new highly-targeted leads
- Builds a follower/fan base
- Promotes new products, services, events, and other content
- Drives e-commerce sales
- Drives customer engagement
- Delivers faster results
- Only pay for clickthroughs
- Reaches a wider audience
- Promotes high-quality content
- Gain insight into your target audience
Examples of paid social content include:
Why Does Paid Social Deliver Better ROI?
As the premier social networks increase their focus on monetised platform investment via paid social marketing, organic reach is somewhat diminishing in comparison.
Organic social is slower-performing, taking time to build and generate results, and it requires an extended campaign. It is more challenging to build upon than a paid social campaign approach. In part, this is because only a fraction of your active followers will be shown your posts in their timelines or newsfeeds (a direct result of the ranking algorithms these platforms use – after all, it is in their best interest to generate as much paid content as possible!). The average organic reach for a post on Facebook is just 5-6% of your follower volume. It, therefore, does not deliver a comparable ROI to paid social.
Paid social outperforms organic social on several fronts. It also enables smaller or newer businesses to compete better with bigger, more established competitors with larger followings.
The biggest drawback of paid social is that it requires a financial outlay with an allocated budget, as well as certain expertise to monitor the campaign and track and analyse results.
For a lot of businesses, a hybrid approach to their social strategy, incorporating both paid and organic, will yield the best results and deliver the right content to the right audience segments simultaneously.
The trick is in achieving the right balance.
Need Help?
Choose Dot-to-Dot Digital for Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
Dot-to-Dot Digital is an experienced team of digital marketing strategists with the talent, insight, and creativity to help you succeed online. With a targeted digital strategy tailored to your business’s unique niche and goals, we can help you boost your online visibility and generate more leads.
Social media marketing (paid and organic) is just one of several services we offer – and we will help you get the balance between paid and organic social right.
Get in touch with us today to chat with a fantastic digital strategist, and discover how we can help you get seen online!
