Here’s an eye-opener: only about 2% of your Facebook followers are seeing your brand’s organic posts. While social media once offered free, potentially limitless access to your audience, today’s social landscape has quickly evolved into a pay-to-play environment. However, while paid social is both effective and essential for brands, organic social still has a critical role to play.
In this episode of The Marketing Remix, “Organic or Paid? Getting the Most out of Social Media,” Heather Pimentel, Manager of Social Marketing, and Adam Gearke, Sr. Display and Social Advertising Specialist, join Reid Carr, CEO of Red Door Interactive to discuss how brands can use organic social to their advantage, while integrating it alongside paid and other marketing channels.
For more details about what we discuss in this episode, continue reading below.
Organic vs Paid Social Reach – It’s a Balance
Social marketing shouldn't be treated as a standalone marketing tactic, but rather should fit within your overall marketing strategy to support your brand message. Social media is still a mainstay to many people who regularly read your content, share it, follow those who are sharing it, and use it as a resource. And no matter how much social marketing has changed and evolved over time with the rise of paid media, there is something about community and natural connection that still draws users to organic. You may need paid budget to amplify your message and make sure it's getting in front of the right people, but you still need organic to support the reach of your paid content (community management, extending earned conversation by engaging with those talking about your brand, etc.).
Strategies to Combat Declining Organic Reach
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Utilize Facebook Groups and other similar features across channels, which offer a ton of engagement and discussion around topics users care about.
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Summarize the key points of blog posts in a LinkedIn status update to get more engagement than posting a link to the same blog content, as the news feed algorithm devalues posts with links leading to external sites.
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Create brand affinity through organic social media, which later leads to direct traffic because more people have heard about your brand, rather than creating referral traffic from social.
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Leverage influencer marketing to authentically engage your consumers.
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Foster Customer Relationships through real-time customer service.
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Focus on Twitter and Instagram as these platforms generally receive the most organic attention.
How is Red Door Interactive evolving its own practices to address the shifting landscape of social marketing?
At Red Door, we use social marketing as part of a cross-channel approach to extend a brand’s message across owned channels. These efforts help to bring your digital personality to reality, to engage audiences with educational and entertaining messages, to build relationships with audiences, and to create an army of advocates.
We create efficiencies by working together to develop branded content that can live on a brand’s channels, and then extend that message into ad development so that the experience is cohesive. Too often paid teams are siloed and operate separately from the content or social team, but by working together to create intriguing or eye-catching content that tells a story, we’re also able to retarget fans who engaged with a piece of content with a more conversion-focused ad. Ultimately, this creates a more well-rounded approach to media, versus sending “buy me now” messages too often that actually result in unlikes or unfollows from your pages.
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