How Do Organic Posts Work with Paid Ads in My Social Media Strategy?
Depending on your personality, participating on social media for your small business could be highly energizing or completely draining. Whichever way you come at it, the bottom line is that your social media strategy must be purposeful and consistent for it to contribute to your business goals.
One of the constantly evolving aspects of building a social following is striking the right balance between organic and paid content. Since the algorithms are always changing, businesses must remain flexible and ready to adapt their strategy to newly emerging styles. Social media companies rely on advertising revenue, which means that they will reward you for your ad spend much more than for your organic reach. Each business owner will need to consider their own goals with social media before charting out the best mix of organic and paid media.
Social Media Goals Will Inform Social Media Strategy
The first element of creating your social media strategy is to determine what your specific goals are.
- Do you find the majority of your customers through social media?
- Which platform are your current customers using most?
- Do you value social media interaction as an effective sales funnel?
- Is social media simply a credibility tool that potential clients use to gather data?
- What is your capacity for social media interaction?
These are just a few questions that will help you determine how social media actually supports your business before you start pouring time, energy, and advertising dollars into your efforts. If you find most of your clients offline, social media may simply be a place to nurture existing clients. This knowledge allows you to focus advertising revenue on those offline pursuits and stick to a mostly organic posting frequency online.
Alternatively, if your ideal client is definitely online, your paid content can be custom-tailored to attract them to your brand. Paid content does not have to look like an ad. In fact, your paid posts can be exactly the same as your organic posts. The paid posts are simply being served up to the demographic you detail in your ad specs.
Who Sees Organic Posts Versus Paid Content on Social Media?
Speaking of how content gets served up to different people, business owners need to get a handle on how this works. Organic posts appear in the post feed of your existing followers, that is, people who like and follow your business profile. The more often you post, the higher the likelihood of your followers seeing and interacting with your posts. When your followers interact with your posts by commenting or reacting, their connections can typically see that activity. This could gain you some new traffic.
Ultimately, social media feeds are so busy that it is difficult to get seen by all of your followers on a given day. The benefit of this is that it means you can recycle content fairly often without it being repetitive to your audience. Consistent posting will help to keep you on the minds of your most loyal customers, which is very valuable in businesses that rely on repeat sales and customer loyalty.
Your paid content is viewed by the audience you define when you create the ad. You can drill down on several demographic points, including likes and recent social activity. The platform will serve your ads to people who fit your ideal customer profile at a frequency that fits your budget. It is very important to determine what action you want people to take if they like your ad. Do you want them to like your business profile, visit your online store, book an informational call, or something else? Every ad should be specifically designed to result in your desired action.
Track Social Media Insights for Post Effectiveness
Social media is never a “set it and forget it” operation. Schedule a weekly time to review your insights to find out how people are interacting with your organic and paid content. If you have an organic post that gained a great deal of interaction, focus on that for your next paid content post. If you find that people tend to take one prompted action but not another, make some tweaks and monitor the new results. If your new followers are not from your expected demographic, maybe you have found a new target market!
Start organizing your social media strategy, and organic vs. paid post balance, based on where you are now. Put together a baseline of your current insights, posting frequency, and follower data. From there, it will take some patient review to learn more about what is working and what could be improved. If this all sounds like more than you can pile onto your own plate, contact Mottofy Marketing for an initial consultation. We have years of experience building social media strategies and can help you get started!
