Organic Social Media: 4 Reasons You Need a Solid Strategy Right Now
Social networks are starting to put significant pressure are brands to spend money to reach their target audiences. However, you don’t need to only focus on paid social media. Both paid and organic social media are necessary to be successful.
What is Organic Social Media?
It is the process of utilizing free tools and services that is provided by social media platforms. This may include posting status updates, images with captions, and links. The sole purpose of this is to build a following of loyal customers and followers by posting relevant and helpful and interacting with users who will engage with your brand. Organic social media marketing allows you to show others your brand’s culture and values, while also learning more about their values.
What is Paid Social Media?
It is the process of paying for displaying sponsored messages or advertisements to various users throughout the social media network based on user characteristic and profiles. Each message or advertisement will incur a specific cost, depending on the individual type of ad. For example, PPC ads will incur a cost every time the advertisement is clicked on by someone.
Prior to simply jumping in and implementing a social media strategy, you should begin by determining ways you can connect your organic and paid efforts to create a streamlined experience for your users when they see your ad.
Here are a few ways in which you can maximize your results by using these two tactics together:
1. Boosting Validity with Organic Social
Once a social media advertisement is seen by someone, they will typically visit the brand’s profile. If you currently don’t have both organic and paid social media strategies, then you probably don’t have many followers. An organic social media strategy is going to be able to help with word-of-mouth marketing since individuals will visit your profile to see what other people think about your brand. Since roughly 88 percent of consumers trust online customer reviews as much as personal recommendations, and 81 percent of individuals are influenced by their friends’ social media posts, it is imperative that you have an organic social media strategy in place to grow positive brand awareness.
If you have not implemented an organic plan that works to post content, address customer concerns, engage with users, then you could be discrediting the validity of your brand through the users that you are targeting through your paid social media efforts. You need both to balance the other out.
2. Organic Is How You Connect with Prospective Customers
Paid social media efforts are going to help you spread the word about your brand, but it is organic social media efforts that are going to help you connect with them afterward.
When compared to paid marketing, there is a 100 percent higher lead-to-close rate for social media marketing. One of the primary reasons organic marketing in social media is so incredibly effective is due to the fact that customers and brands are able to learn about one another at the same time since they’re posting and sharing what they feel is relevant or important to themselves.
Plus, if prospective customers who located your brand through paid efforts have concerns, they will be able to contact you through social media. You are able to gain certain insights about the audience that can receive your messaging the best through paid tactics that you may not receive any other way. As long as you understand this information, you can then work on pushing organic messaging that best aligns with your audience’s demographics and interests.
This ensures that you are using both organic and paid social media to complement one another.
3. Organic Is Cost-Effective and Long-Term
The great thing about organic social media is that it fits any brand’s budget. Regardless of your size, you can’t be effective with or without a huge budget. In terms of social media, it all boils down to creating the most transparent, clever and attention-grabbing content – it doesn’t necessarily come back to the largest budget. So, rather than being crippled by your budget, you are only limited by how creative you can be.
Through organic efforts, you will need to engage with your audience. This can be done by answering customer questions, providing feedback, responding to feedback, or starting your own conversation about your brand. All of this makes it a lot easier to develop a solid reputation that will be sustainable down the road.
4. Failing to Start Organic Now Will Leave You in the Dust
If your brand has not yet started to work with organic social media, then you are already behind. Research shows that 91 percent of brands are currently active on at least two social media sites – 65 million businesses have active Facebook Pages and 84 percent of B2B marketers use social media in one way or another.
The good news is that there is a lot of information out there that you can research and learn about, which can benefit your brand as you work to build your own strategy for social media. Social media is an influential platform, and customers do use it before they decide where to place their loyalties. Therefore, make sure that your social media profile speaks to your target audience, but it also needs to be similar to your advertisements that you use – consistency is always key.
Conclusion
Brands that are aiming for success with social media need to make use of both paid and organic efforts. This will ensure that an engaging brand and user experience is provided to customers, which will help your brand yield amazing results.
If you need help getting started, don’t hesitate to reach out to our professional team here at WebDetail.