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Tag: Social Media Advertising

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Organic vs. Paid Social Media: Which is Best?

  • October 6, 2020

Organic vs. Paid Social Media: Which Is Best?

 

Differentiating between organic and paid social media isn’t too difficult to comprehend – the names of each pretty much explain themselves.

Organic social media involves using the free services and tools provided by each social media platform to build a social community and regularly interact with it by publishing content, sharing others’ posts, responding to customer comments, and engaging with the online community at large.

Paid social media is marketing and advertising — such as text, images, videos, carousels, etc. – that you pay for to place on popular social media platforms. With this type of promotion, you can define and target a specific audience (based on demographics, location, behavior, interests, etc.) in order to reach a larger number of people — specifically those who may already have an interest in your products or services. The cost incurred depends on the type of ad you’re running, typically on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis. Examples include: display ads, boosted posts, branded or influencer-generated content, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, or sponsored marketing messages.

Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each is likely a more worthwhile endeavor. In this article, we’ll attempt to explore some of the most common pros and cons that come with both organic and paid social media advertising.

Pros of Organic Social Media

 

Direct Engagement with Consumers

Social media has become a fantastic marketing channel for businesses to implement and capitalize on. A well-ordered, vibrant social media profile provides customers with a logical, convenient environment to express concerns, complaints, and compliments. If you can devote the time and resources to routinely respond to most — if not all — of them, you’ll be able to maximize your organic social media endeavors.

By marketing your business on social media platforms, you are able to communicate with current and prospective customers virtually on a one-on-one basis. Engaging with and responding to clients and prospects helps build trust, which increases the chances that they will do business with you in the future.

Gather Helpful Insight & Feedback

Although it can take quite a bit of time and effort, listening in on and actively participating in your intended audience’s online conversations can help you attain valuable knowledge about their pain points, as well as their likes and dislikes. You can collect useful feedback on how to improve your products or services simply by asking questions and sharing polls to collect additional data.

Brand Identity

Your social media account provides an opportunity to inject a bit of personality into your brand. This presents another layer to your marketing efforts by allowing you to establish the right tone and proactively choose how you want your customers to regard you.

Addressing customers’ comments directly demonstrates that you’re genuinely concerned about their opinions. Exhibiting a sense of humor in your content and regularly offering sound advice can really humanize your brand for customers.

More Cost-Effective

Sustaining a consistent organic social media presence doesn’t actually cost a thing. You don’t have to pay to create or publish to your social media accounts on popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram, making them attractive options for organizations with a limited marketing budget.

If you don’t have the time and resources to handle everything yourself, you’ll need to hire a social media marketing agency or dedicated team members to craft and curate the right content and connect with your target audience.

Cons of Organic Social Media

 

Time-Consuming

Social media platforms can be particularly fun and exciting for personal use. But when it comes to utilizing them for business purposes, there’s quite a bit more to it than just posting hilarious memes. Your goal should be to engage with your customers and collect responses — and these results won’t happen overnight.

Posting to your social media pages consistently is a crucial step toward cultivating your brand relationship and customer base. Routinely coming up with fresh and compelling content that’s relevant and useful to your audience expends a considerable amount of energy and effort. If you don’t have a team — whether in-house or outsourced — assigned to maintaining your social media efforts, it can also become a major time-drain for business owners.

Social media advertising campaigns also demand near-constant observation. It’s critical to monitor your content to keep an eye out for any negative responses, as these must always be addressed in an appropriate and timely manner.

Less Flexibility Regarding Immediate Reach

The initial reach of your organic social media efforts spans as far as your followers take it — meaning you can only anticipate your organic content to reach your immediate audience and anyone they choose to share it with. You can’t target and circulate your content to specific demographics or user types like you can with paid social media.

Algorithms Can Be Volatile & Hard to Comprehend

The content your audience sees on social media is determined by complicated algorithms designed to sort posts by relevance and potential enrichment, rather than when it was published. The effectiveness of your organic social media strategies hinges on your ability to get your content before current and prospective customers. Therefore, understanding the algorithms that support these platforms is critical. But this is much easier said than done.

Social media algorithms aren’t easy to decipher or master — and even if you do make sense of them, there’s a good chance they’ll just change again. It can take a great deal of effort to understand and stay on top of these algorithms to keep your organic social media endeavors going strong.

Only Targets Your Current Followers

Organic social media will only directly reach your current followers, aside from anyone with whom they may potentially share your content. If you’re looking to target specific demographics, this can only be achieved with paid advertising.

Pros of Paid Social Media

 

Target Specific Users to Expand Your Reach

Paid advertising on social media allows you to extend your reach beyond your existing followers, pinpointing and connecting with the precise people who will be the most receptive to whatever product or service you’re providing. You can sort users categorically, using criteria such as location, age, gender, income, or interests and place targeted advertisements on their social media feeds.

More Immediate & Trackable Results

Organic social media initiatives require more effort and strategy, and results aren’t always assured. You’re obligated to create content that abides by the social media platform’s algorithms, rein in any potential customers that stumble across it, and strive to maintain your followers once you’ve got them hooked. Paid social media works in conjunction with the algorithms, sorting by the most relevant, and immediately places your content front and center on prospective customers’ feeds.

Compatible with Practically Any Budget

Paid social campaigns are crafted to adapt to virtually any budget, making them suitable for both small and big businesses alike. Charges are generally incurred on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis, meaning you only have to pay if users interact directly with your paid social media content via impressions or clicks.

Many platforms permit you to set a spending cap on your paid social endeavors, ensuring that you never exceed your budget. What’s more, certain target audiences cost less to reach than others, enabling you to strategically position your advertisements to accommodate a variety of potentially profitable niches.

Boost Your Conversions

Paid social media advertising increases your brand’s visibility, which translates into more engagement, more leads, and the possibilities of more sales and profits. Since you’re able to reach a wider, more targeted audience with paid advertisements, you can improve your chances of achieving a higher conversion rate. Paid social media also helps increase coveted metrics such as click-through rate (CTR), cost-per-lead (CPL), and return on ad spend (ROAS).

 

Cons of Paid Social Media

 

Social Media Marketing Is a Competitive Environment

Marketing on social media isn’t exactly unheard of these days. In fact, according to a recent study by Statista, an estimated 91% of all U.S. companies used social media marketing to some degree in 2019.

Finding a seat at that crowded table might mean contending with particularly high PPC rates in order to reach your target demographic and requiring top-notch, engaging content to maximize your paid social budget.

Requires Time & Attention

Your paid social media efforts are rarely static. They need to be tracked, evaluated, and consistently modified if you want to secure the best return on investment. A number of platforms offer analytics that help clarify how your content or ads are performing. This data isn’t insignificant and shouldn’t be ignored — it requires lots of attention and consideration and should shed light on how you structure your messaging as it progresses. Paid social media is often only as effective as the effort you put into it — in most cases, your biggest investment will be time.

Might Not See Meaningful Returns on Your Investment

Regardless of the size of your expenditure, you’re still dropping cash that could go to waste if your efforts are unsuccessful. If you’re continually experimenting and falling flat with your paid social media, you’re essential squandering money — and that’s an easy cycle to fall into.

If you’re a small business, lacking the expertise to capably manage your paid social strategy, you could find yourself draining resources that would be better designated for other marketing channels.

It’s Only Temporary

Continuous exposure, traffic, and growth will only endure as long as you keep investing in your ads. If you want to keep up the momentum, it may be advantageous to consider a strategy that also integrates organic social media marketing.

Final Thoughts

Neither organic nor paid social media is inherently superior to the other. Different strategies complement different businesses with different priorities in different situations. One approach might better serve your budget, while another might prove to be far more effective. Assess all your options and explore all avenues before diving headfirst into either strategy.

If your organization doesn’t have the budget for a full-blown paid social media strategy, dedicate yourself to organic social media endeavors. Create thoughtful content, refine your social profiles, and actively engage with your customers online. Alternately, if your business has a substantial marketing budget and desperately needs to capture new customers immediately, prioritize your paid social media efforts.

The ideal approach would be to find ways to incorporate both organic and paid techniques into your overall social media strategy. Paid social media can help generate more immediate results, such as increasing brand awareness and gaining followers on your social pages. Once your audience has been established, use your organic content and active social presence to captivate their interest, convert them into customers, and retain them once they’re on board.

Strive to identify which social tactics are best suited to you and your business. Where should you be investing your resources? What are your goals for using social media? Are you willing to devote your time to playing the “long game” and creating a loyal community? Would you rather shell out some cash now to see instantaneous results, or are you engaged in it for the foreseeable future?

Remember to regularly try new approaches. Your company, your consumers, and the world itself are changing all the time. Your marketing strategies need to change with them.

If you’re struggling to develop a successful social media marketing strategy on your own, then struggle no more! The friendly folks at HighClick Media are more than happy to work with you to customize a plan that’s suited to your specific business needs. Give us a call at 252.814.2150 today!

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How to Increase Your Organic Reach On Social Media

  • August 16, 2022
  • Jason Hill

Ever Wonder Why No One's Seeing Your Posts On Social Media?

"You don't have to "pay to play" to get noticed on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter."

Over the past several years, organic reach on social media has been noticeably declining. This is primarily because social media platforms are pushing companies towards paid ads and promotions.

While increasing your marketing budget may be the simplest approach to increase distribution and drive sales, it’s not always an option for many small businesses.

10 Tips for Increasing Your Organic Reach on Social Media

What is Organic Reach?

Organic reach refers to the potential audience visibility of your posts on social media. Essentially, it’s a way to measure how many people are seeing your content without you having to pay to promote it.

How Social Media's Algorithms Affect Reach

In an effort to support a positive user experience – and ostensibly to pressure businesses to “pay to play” – Facebook and other prominent social media platforms have implemented complicated algorithms. 

These algorithms work by placing your posts in a pool as small as 1% of your followers. If those people engage with your posts, then they get pushed to a larger audience. Slowly but surely, more and more people will see your content – but only if it’s engaging. But this enlightening tidbit doesn’t help you if you don’t know what each social media platform considers engaging.

Facebook’s algorithm, for example, looks at hundreds of thousands of factors when determining whether a post will make it into a particular person’s newsfeed. While many of these factors aren’t public knowledge, some of them have been identified:

  • High-quality content is rated more highly
  • Anything regarded as spam will be limited or removed
  • The more engaged users are, the higher the post is rated
  • Negative feedback from users will minimize reach
  • Greater priority is given to videos and photos
  • The user’s past interaction with the page or post type affects visibility

On the surface, it may seem unfair that social media platforms are limiting your reach so dramatically. But it’s important to understand that these algorithms have to be selective. There’s far too much content on social media to digest, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to see it all.

In this article, we’ll explore a series of steps you can take to help boost your organic reach on social media

 

10 Tips for Increasing Your Organic Reach on Social Media

1) Develop a Social Media Content Strategy

If you want your content to engage customers and perform well organically, you have to invest time and thought into its development. Start by reviewing your business’s goals for using social media in the first place. Find out who your target audience is and identify their wants, needs, and pain points.

Blatant promotions won’t grow your reach or engage your audience. Instead, communicate your business’s unique story and vision through personalized, entertaining, and thoughtful content.

2) Choose the Right Platforms for Your Brand

Many businesses think they need to have a presence on all the major social media platforms, but that’s not necessarily true. Why waste your time and energy promoting your business on a particular social media site if your target audience isn’t using it?

A little research goes a long way in determining which platforms to choose to get your desired results on social media.

Take a look at where your direct competitors are posting on social media. If they’re nowhere to be found on a particular platform, chances are, you shouldn’t be there, either.

If you have a blog on your website, take advantage of its built-in analytics tools to see who’s sharing your content – and more importantly, where they’re sharing it.

Finally, if you want to get the most accurate info about your audience, just ask them. Conduct a survey, send out an email, or even pick up the phone and call them.

3) Optimize Your Social Media Profiles

Every aspect of your social media profile can be tweaked and optimized for increased visibility, which in turn will help increase your overall reach. 

Key tactics for profile optimization include:

  • Easy-to-remember username (the closer it is to your brand name, the better)
  • Recognizable photo or brand logo
  • Keyword-rich descriptions that still sound natural
  • Trackable link back to your website

When posting your content on social media, you can use these same criteria to select/decide which images you use, what keywords to include, and how to phrase your calls-to-action. This rule of thumb applies across any and all social networking sites.

4) Focus on Quality Over Quantity

The average Facebook user is exposed to over 1,500 stories each day. To keep the user engaged, the newsfeed only displays about 300 of these – the stories it deems most relevant. With this knowledge in hand, clearly posting more often isn’t the answer.

Instead, focus on producing high-quality, relevant content that your audience will be interested in and want to engage with. Posting valuable content less frequently will enhance your organic reach better than inundating your page with everything you can think of.

There’s no exact science as to how often you should post on social media. Since each platform is different and every business is unique, experiment with different frequencies to see what works best for you.

Get to know your audience by researching similar pages, paying attention to your analytics, and gaining a better understanding of what your followers like and respond to. Post frequently enough to stay relevant to your followers, but not so much that you become a nuisance.

5) Target Content to Reach Your Ideal Users

This strategy varies by platform, but tweaking the settings on your posts to target specific members of your audience can also help boost your organic reach.

On Facebook, for example, you can use organic post targeting to have your post only show up to particular demographics, based on things such as gender, relationship status, education level, age, location, language, and interests.

Of course, you want to make sure that you’re targeting the right audience in the first place. You don’t want to waste time and resources on sharing content with people outside your target personas.

Social media analytics tools can help provide insights into your audience so you can develop and implement your strategies effectively. Create content with your specific audience in mind – after all, these are the people most likely to see and “like” your posts and potentially share them with their friends.

10 Tips for Increasing Your Organic Reach on Social Media - Continued..

Tips...

6) Identify the Best Times to Post

Every second of every day, social media platforms get bombarded with content from millions of different users. In order to get the maximum impact from your social media marketing, timing your posts well is critical.

If you post when the majority of users are online, your content may get lost in a sea of posts that everyone else is seeing. If you post during non-peak hours, you’re less likely to get drowned out by all the noise on social media.

On Twitter, where content is displayed in chronological order, timing is especially important. If the majority of your audience is logging on to Twitter in the evening, but you’ve posted in the morning, only users who tirelessly scroll through all the posts, or make a special effort to look at your feed, will see your content.

7) Post a Variety of Different Content Types

Certain content types have proven to generate a huge boost in organic reach. On Facebook, video content has the highest organic reach by a margin of almost 3%. This is huge, considering that the average organic reach on the platform has dropped to 1% or less. Videos also tend to get shared more often than other types of content, which also contributes to greater reach.

Since people are attracted to visuals over text alone, adding images or GIFs to your posts also helps get more eyes on your content.

8) Promote Your Social Media Profiles Everywhere

Every place your business has a presence – your website, storefront, business cards, email signatures, etc. – should steer users towards your social media platforms.

Add “follow” buttons on your website so that users can instantly follow or “like” your page without having to leave your site. The idea is to make your presence known everywhere, which will ultimately lead to tremendous growth for your organic reach.

9) Strike a Balance Between Promotional and Useful Content

Along with promotional content about your business’s products or services, users want to see content that’s useful to them. Sharing valuable content – such as articles, blog posts, how-to guides, etc. – builds users’ trust in your brand. In short order, people will come to recognize you as an authority in the industry and take you at your word when you recommend a particular product or service.

The key here is mastering the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule – in other words, 80% of your content should be informative and useful, while the remaining 20% should be used to promote your business and its products or services. The 80% will draw in new followers and foster brand trust, which will lead to them seeing the other 20% and hopefully purchasing what you’re offering. Remember to include a mixture of videos, images, and other engaging content types to keep things interesting.

10) Interact and Engage with Your Followers

One of the simplest ways to get your audience to engage with your content is by directly interacting with them. Asking questions in your posts encourages followers to personally respond to your content and hopefully spark a conversation in the comments section.

When someone comments on one of your posts – whether in the form of feedback, complaints, or compliments – try to keep the conversation going by replying publicly. The more engagement the post has, the higher it will rank in the social platform’s algorithm, thus growing your organic reach exponentially.

By effectively communicating with your audience and replying to their comments, you’ll build a great reputation that will spread. People will seek out your posts because they’re truly interested in what you’re doing.

Always Remember...

*Encourage and Curate User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is any type of content – whether it be text, images, videos, reviews, etc. – created by individual people, rather than brands.

Often, this content will include or mention a brand and its products or services. Businesses may choose to share this UGC on their own social media pages, website, or other marketing channels.

User-generated content is an effective form of engagement because it’s essentially a win-win for both parties – brands get to connect with fans that are proud to show off their products or services, and in return, those fans get the chance to be featured by the brand and even potentially grow their own following.

Outstanding UGC can not only lead to increased engagement for your business, but also higher conversion rates, improved brand trust, and a great deal of time saved on content creation as well.

If you’re wondering how to get UGC for your brand, one idea to consider is to start a hashtag campaign. Create a customized hashtag for your campaign, then ask your audience to post content featuring your brand or products. Encourage them to use the campaign hashtag in their captions. Turn it into a contest, with the chance to win a prize or be featured in an upcoming social media post, and you’ll see even more valuable

Final Thoughts..

Social media platforms are continually updating their algorithms to benefit their users. That isn’t going to change anytime soon. But this only makes things more difficult for businesses that rely on these platforms as integral components of their overall marketing strategy. 

As is often the case with social media marketing, there’s no universal strategy to help boost your organic reach. But implementing the tips outlined here is certainly a good place to start.

It’s going to require a great deal of planning, as well as consistent work and commitment. But it really boils down to creating sensational content that your users will want to share.

The key is to work smarter, not harder. Concentrate on improving your content as well as your social media approach, and the desired results will follow. If you don’t instantly see an increase in organic reach, don’t lose heart. Remember, it’s a long-term process that demands that you maintain your focus.

When you partner with HighClick Media for your social media marketing, we can help elevate your business by increasing traffic to your website, boosting brand awareness, and improving relationships with your customers and prospects.

Are you ready to maximize your marketing efforts and reach a bigger audience with your messaging? Call us today at 252.814.2150 or drop us a line here.

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