By Emily Prior-Such – Senior social media account manager
In the ever-evolving digital landscape, businesses need to stand out online more than ever before. Social media has become an essential tool for brands to connect with their audience, enhance brand visibility and drive sales. Whether you are a small startup company or a global empire, social media should play a key role in your overall marketing strategy.
However, there are two main ways to approach social media marketing; organic and paid social media. While both methods have their unique benefits and drawbacks, understanding the difference between organic vs paid social media is vital for crafting an effective strategy.
What is organic social media?
Organic social media is posted by brands on their social media platforms naturally without spending money on advertising. These posts are shared with those who follow the social media accounts and are an existing audience of the brand. By using strategies such as hashtags, shares, or tagging other accounts, you can organically reach more users without paying a penny.
A few examples of organic social media include sharing posts on Facebook, stories on Instagram or polls on LinkedIn. You can go one step further with organic engagement by commenting, liking and sharing to encourage authentic interactions with your audience.
The benefits of organic social media
Since no advertising spend is involved with organic social media, it is a free way to connect with your audience. With this method being cost-effective, using organic social media to reach your audience is an effective marketing strategy for small businesses or those with small budgets.
An advantage of organically posting on social media is that you will create a loyal customer base. By posting authentic content, you will connect with a genuine audience that will gather credible interactions over time, helping you to build trust and a deeper relationship with your customer base.
Furthermore, by regularly posting high-quality content, you can indirectly improve your website’s search engine ranking by driving organic traffic to your site. You can tap into an audience that otherwise may not have discovered you on Google.
The difficulties of organic social media
Building a strong organic presence requires a long-term commitment to content creation, engagement, and community management. It can take months or even years to see significant growth and garner results.
Without paid promotion, your posts are primarily seen by your current followers, which makes it challenging to reach new audiences in a short time frame.
What is paid social media?
Paid social media is a strategic approach that involves utilising social media platforms to promote content, products, or services through paid advertising. Unlike organic social media, where content reaches audiences naturally, paid social media leverages paid advertising options to reach a wider and more targeted audience.
This approach offers businesses a range of benefits, including increased visibility, targeted reach and measurable results. By utilising paid social media, businesses can enhance their online presence, drive website traffic, generate leads, and ultimately achieve their marketing goals.
Where can you use paid social media?
Popular paid social media platforms include Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and TikTok, each offering unique advertising options and targeting capabilities. For example, Facebook offers a wide range of advertising formats, including custom audience creation, targeted ads, and video ads. Instagram allows for sponsored content, story ads, and influencer marketing. X offers promoted tweets, promoted accounts, and X Ads. LinkedIn is ideal for B2B marketing with options like sponsored content, text ads, and inMail. TikTok, a rapidly growing platform, provides opportunities for sponsored content, in-feed ads, and brand takeovers.
The benefits of paid social media
Paid social platforms allow you to narrow down your audience based on demographics, interests, and behaviour, ensuring your content reaches the right people. With this targeted approach, you can reach your desired audience much faster than growing an organic social media following.
Paid social ads are extremely effective for time-sensitive promotions or product launches. They deliver immediate exposure, making them effective at delivering key messages when needed.
One of the biggest advantages of paid social is the ability to track and measure performance. Metrics like click-through rates (CTR), impressions, conversions, and return on ad spend (ROAS) provide insights into campaign success. These measurable results can then be used to fine-tune your ads, alter budget spend and consequently deliver better results.
The difficulties of paid social media
Depending on your industry, target audience, and ad objectives, social media ads can be costly. A large-scale paid campaign can eat into your budget quickly if not managed effectively. It can be difficult to find the sweet spot of ad spend, especially for small businesses.
Social media ads need to be managed and updated frequently, otherwise you may encounter ad fatigue. This is where the same ads are being served over and over again to your audience. This can lead to ‘ad blindness’ where users start ignoring paid content. Additionally, users may become frustrated if they feel bombarded by ads.
Choosing the right strategy: organic vs paid social media
When deciding between organic vs paid social media, it is not necessarily about choosing one over the other but rather finding the right balance for your business. To decide which social media strategy suits your needs, consider the following:
- Are you working with small budgets? If you are working with a tight budget, you may want to focus more on organic growth in the early stages. However, if you have the funds for a paid campaign, paid social can provide immediate results and broaden your reach.
- What are your business and marketing goals? If your objective is long-term relationship building, brand awareness, and trust, then organic content is key. If you need a short-term boost in leads, sales, or website traffic, paid social may be more effective.
- What time and resources do you have available? Organic social media requires time and consistent effort to build and maintain a community. Whereas, paid social media advertising delivers faster results with a higher upfront cost. Consider whether your company has the time to create and manage organic content or if a paid strategy is more realistic.
- Are you trying to reach a very specific audience group? Paid ads allow for highly targeted campaigns based on detailed user data. You can target specific demographics, locations and interests. On the other hand, organic content can foster authentic relationships with your core followers.
Best practices for organic social media
Both organic and paid social media require strategic execution to maximise results. There are some best practices to keep in mind when posting organically on social media.
Firstly, post consistently to keep your audience engaged and signal to the algorithm that your page is active. Posting regularly builds trust with your audience and keeps your brand top of mind. When curating your content, focus on providing value. This may be through educational content, entertainment, or inspiration. Keep in mind that creating high-quality visuals, videos, and well-crafted messages will attract more attention.
An important aspect of organic social media is engaging with your audience and building a community. Social media is a two-way street. Respond to comments, participate in conversations, and show genuine interest in what your audience is saying. Going further, you can encourage user-generated content from your followers.
When creating captions for your organic social media, ensure to use relevant hashtags and keywords within your post. This will help to increase the visibility of your content beyond your existing followers. Hashtags can help you tap into trending topics and conversations.
Best practices for paid social media
When creating your paid social media strategy, there are a few best practices to implement that will help to make your paid ads a success.
Firstly, always set clear objectives before you begin. You will need these when setting up your ads within the ads manager of the social media platform you have chosen. Decide whether your campaign wants to achieve brand awareness, lead generation, or drive sales. This will guide your targeting and ad copy decisions.
Make use of the granular targeting options that paid platforms offer by creating custom audiences or retargeting audiences. You should define your audiences by narrowing down on demographics, interests, locations and behaviours that closely match your ideal customer.
Paid ads need to grab attention quickly. The average human attention span is only 8.25 seconds long and social media is only decreasing this. In order to combat this, invest in high-quality images, videos, and attention-grabbing ad copy that clearly communicates your brand message.
When setting up your ads, you can complete A/B testing. This tests different versions of your ads to see which performs best. You can test small changes in headlines, images, or calls to action to see how they can impact results. From here you can optimise your ads to perform the best they can.
Paid social media provides real-time data, so take advantage of it. Regularly monitor performance metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost-per-click, adjusting your strategy to maximise ROI.
Organic vs paid social media: which should you invest in?
Both organic and paid social media strategies have distinct advantages, and understanding their differences is essential to building a successful social media marketing strategy. Organic social media is invaluable for fostering long-term relationships, building brand loyalty, and creating an authentic presence. In contrast, paid social media offers quick, targeted exposure with measurable results that can boost brand visibility and generate immediate leads or sales.
The most successful businesses combine both approaches. They will use organic content to engage and build trust with their audience, while strategically utilising paid campaigns to expand reach and drive conversions. Ultimately, the key to success in the “organic vs paid social media” debate lies in understanding your unique business goals, audience, and resources.
Talk to our social media experts
At Cartwright Communications, our dedicated social media team is passionate about helping brands connect with their target audience on a meaningful level. We craft compelling campaigns that resonate deeply, fostering brand loyalty and driving exceptional results.
If you would like to discuss your brand’s social media strategy, please contact us here and we will be in touch.
