One of the biggest challenges of organic social media is the low reach and visibility of your content. Due to the algorithms of most platforms, your organic posts are likely to be shown to only a small fraction of your followers, let alone new potential customers. This means that you are missing out on a lot of opportunities to attract, convert, and retain your audience. Moreover, organic social media is highly competitive and saturated, as you have to compete with millions of other posts from other brands, influencers, and users. To stand out and get noticed, you need to produce high-quality, relevant, and engaging content consistently, which can be time-consuming and costly.
Relying solely on organic social media presents several challenges and risks: - Limited Reach: Organic posts often reach fewer people due to algorithm restrictions. - Slow Growth: Building a substantial following and engagement is time-consuming. - Unpredictable Algorithms: Algorithm changes can affect visibility and engagement. - Inconsistent Engagement: Organic reach can result in fluctuating engagement levels. - High Competition: Your content can easily be overlooked due to competition. - Resource Intensive: Creating high-quality content requires significant time and resources without guaranteed results. These factors highlight the importance of diversifying your social media strategy.
Limited Reach: Organic content often struggles to break through algorithm barriers, limiting visibility. Slow Growth: Building a substantial audience organically can be a marathon, not a sprint. Changing Algorithms: Platforms frequently tweak algorithms, potentially reducing your content's reach overnight. Time-Intensive: Crafting engaging organic content requires significant time and effort. No Guarantees: Even great content isn't guaranteed to go viral or reach your target audience. Organic social media is a gamble - sometimes you hit the jackpot, sometimes it's just crickets!
Relying only on organic social media can be like shouting into the void. 🌌 Low reach means your brilliant content might not even see the light of day. And talk about being at the mercy of ever-changing algorithms! 🔄 Plus, measuring success? Like trying to catch fog... It's tough to scale when you're whispering in a hurricane. That's where a sprinkle of paid social comes in - Balancing organic charm with the strategic punch of paid ads... Now that's the sweet spot. 🎯
Organic social takes time and the results are not guaranteed, however, paid social doesn't guarantee results either. The results often don't match the investment for companies with a smaller budget. In addition, different platforms can yield varying results. Ultimately it's about your campaign objectives if B2B leads are your objective then look at Linkedin, but even here there are options. Linkedin tops the tree when it comes to costs for any lead gen campaign. But even using the free version old old-fashioned research can help maybe a more targeted ABM campaign. No budget for facebook? Thin about these options - facebook live is always heavily promoted by the algorithm and at the end of it you're left with great reusable content.
The term social in regard to media suggests platforms enable communal activity. Social media can enhance and extend human networks. Users access social media through web-based apps or custom apps on mobile devices. These interactive platforms allow individuals, communities, and organizations to share, co-create, discuss, participate in, and modify user-generated or self-curated content. Social media are used to document memories, learn, and form friendships. They may be used to promote people, companies, products, and ideas. Social media can be used to consume, publish, or share news.
Another challenge of organic social media is the limited control and flexibility you have over your content and campaigns. You are subject to the rules and policies of each platform, which can change frequently and without notice. For example, if a platform decides to update its algorithm, reduce its organic reach, or ban certain topics or keywords, your organic strategy might be affected negatively. Additionally, you have little control over who sees your content, when they see it, and how they interact with it. You cannot target specific segments of your audience based on their demographics, interests, or behaviors, nor can you optimize your content for different goals, such as awareness, traffic, or conversions.
The one organic metric that typically exceeds paid media is engagement rate. Keep your focus on building trust and loyalty and your social media followers will remember you. You also can't expect much engagement from your audience if you aren't reaching out and engaging with your audience.
Control is totally on the platforms side, it's logical as the platform is built and run by them. You cannot do whatever on their platform. You are controlled and restricted by the policies they have. You get free access to their party but you can be kicked out very fast.
1️⃣ Consider diversifying your strategy: While organic social media is valuable, it's risky to rely solely on it. Supplement your efforts with paid advertising to gain more control over targeting, reach, and optimization. 2️⃣ Stay informed and adaptable: Keep abreast of platform updates and industry trends to anticipate changes and mitigate potential impacts on your organic strategy. Remain flexible and ready to adjust your approach accordingly. 3️⃣ Invest in owned assets: Build and nurture your owned assets like email lists and website traffic. These channels offer more control and stability compared to organic social media, reducing reliance on platform algorithms and policies.
Algorithm Changes: Platforms can change their algorithms without warning, affecting how and when your content is seen. Content Restrictions: Organic content must adhere strictly to platform guidelines, limiting your creativity and flexibility compared to paid ads that offer more diverse options for targeting and placement.
With organic posts, you have minimal control over who sees your content and when. Timing and audience targeting are less precise compared to paid advertising.
A third challenge of organic social media is the difficulty to measure and scale your results. While most platforms provide some basic analytics and insights on your organic performance, such as impressions, likes, shares, or comments, these metrics are often not enough to evaluate the effectiveness and return on investment (ROI) of your organic strategy. You might not be able to track how many leads, sales, or customers you generate from your organic posts, or how they contribute to your overall business objectives. Furthermore, scaling your organic social media can be challenging, as you need to constantly create more and better content, grow your audience, and maintain your engagement levels, which can be hard to sustain in the long run.
What you can do is pay attention to what the limited metrics can tell you. Break down engagements by type. For example, a post that gets a lot of reactions might mean you've hit on a topic that's of high interest to your audience. If a post gets a high CTR, your audience is eager to learn more about the topic. If a post gets Saves, that might mean your audience isn't necessarily ready right now to purchase, but could be soon and wants to remember you. Use these insights to develop more content that caters to these needs/wants.
1️⃣ Limited Reach: Organic content may struggle to reach a broad audience without paid promotion, impacting visibility and engagement. 2️⃣ Algorithm Changes: Social media algorithms evolve, affecting organic content visibility, posing a risk to consistent engagement and reach. 3️⃣ Time-Intensive: Managing organic social media demands ongoing effort in content creation and engagement, potentially diverting resources from other business tasks.
Measurement Challenges: Tracking the impact and ROI of organic social media efforts can be complex and less precise compared to paid campaigns with clear metrics and analytics. Scalability Issues: Growing your audience and influence through organic methods alone can be slow and unpredictable, making it difficult to achieve significant growth rapidly.
Actually, you can measure some key metrics, such as clicks from organic content. Furthermore, you can look into your website analytics and see how much time a user from social media spends on your website, and if converts. The problem with organic is scale. You need to put a lot of effort and/or money into production. This effort might not be rewarding as the algorithm is constantly changing. New types of content emerge and you have to keep up with it. One good example is short videos. This type of content is the most effective now (2024). But in a year or two, maybe AR content, or long-form video will be trendy, you never know. The alternative is simple, pay for the ads, test out what works for you and scale paid advertising.
Measuring the effectiveness of organic social media efforts can be challenging. Metrics like engagement and reach are less tangible, making it harder to scale efforts reliably.
Given the challenges and risks of relying solely on organic social media, you might want to consider adding social media advertising to your marketing mix. This refers to the paid and targeted ways of reaching and engaging your audience on social platforms, such as running ads, sponsored posts, or stories. Social media advertising can offer a range of benefits that can complement and enhance your organic social media efforts. You can reach more people who are interested in your products or services, regardless of whether they follow you or not. Additionally, you can control your budget, duration, and frequency of your campaigns, as well as customize your ads for different platforms, audiences, and goals. You can also access more advanced analytics and insights on your paid performance, such as clicks, conversions, or ROI. This makes it easier to measure and scale your campaigns by adjusting your budget, targeting, or bidding strategies.
Paid social media is effective in boosting awareness and visibility, whereas organic strategies, tailored to each platform, can humanize your brand and showcase expertise. Paid methods primarily focus on selling, while organic approaches excel in creating a more personable brand image and demonstrating industry proficiency. Nevertheless, platforms like Facebook or Instagram have become less conducive to organic reach. In contrast, social media platforms such as TikTok and LinkedIn currently prioritize and facilitate organic content, offering a more friendly environment for organic engagement and visibility.
As a marketer, one of your main objectives is to change how people think and act. None of that matters if no one is paying attention. Many companies create enormous amounts of content yet fail to distribute it properly. Paid social is a useful investment to achieve guaranteed distribution to your ICP. You ensure that the right content gets seen by the right people, which sets your team up to build relationships with those key people. Consider looking at LinkedIn’s thought leadership ads. This ad type allows you to promote content from your team's personal profiles to help broaden their reach. Doing so can help build momentum for your content distribution, amplify your brand, and ultimately drive significant business results.
1️⃣ Leverage targeting capabilities: Social media advertising allows precise targeting based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. This ensures your message reaches the right audience, enhancing campaign effectiveness. 2️⃣ Amplify reach and visibility: Paid social media efforts extend your reach beyond organic limitations, increasing brand visibility and attracting potential customers who may not have discovered you otherwise. 3️⃣ Gain valuable insights: Access to detailed analytics provides actionable data on campaign performance, enabling strategic adjustments to optimize results and maximize return on investment.
Enhanced Targeting: Paid social media allows for precise audience targeting based on demographics, interests, and behaviors, increasing the relevance and effectiveness of your content. Boosted Visibility: Advertising can significantly enhance the reach of your posts, ensuring your content is seen by a larger, more targeted audience. Immediate Results: Paid campaigns can generate quicker results, driving immediate traffic, engagement, and conversions compared to the slower growth of organic methods.
Paid social media advertising offers targeted reach, precise audience segmentation, and measurable ROI. It complements organic efforts by enhancing visibility and engagement.
Organic and paid social media are not mutually exclusive, but rather can work together to create an effective marketing strategy. To balance the two, you should align them with your overall marketing goals and objectives. Organic social media should be used to build and nurture your community, establish your brand voice and personality, and provide value and education to your audience. Paid social media should be used to amplify your reach and visibility, drive traffic and conversions, and generate leads and sales. Additionally, ensure that your content and ads across both channels are relevant, engaging, and trustworthy for your audience. Finally, analyze and optimize your organic and paid social media performance regularly. Monitor metrics and KPIs, test different variables, and learn from your data to identify what works well for both channels.
In my experience, an organic social presence is mandatory in this day and age. Your social presence becomes, in many regards, your brand's digital face. On the other hand, I have seen brands spend more than twelve thousand dollars on an organic post which received 2 likes. A tough pill to swallow. A brand's organic strategy must be thoughtfully baked out, to drive actions needed to justify ROI. Listening to what your community wants and analyzing post performance helps curate more consistently meaningful content; exactly what your audience wants.
If you are using paid social to do all of your full-funnel marketing, not only is this expensive but will also waste money. Organic plays a pivotal role in the funnel, not only does it play a massive part of raising brand awareness, and brand voice but you can test content and formats, analyse your audience from website demographics. Lay the foundations for what a good paid strategy will be. Without this, you will have to reply on your paid to do all of that meaning a large proportion of your budget will go towards testing. When LinkedIn ads are already expensive, use organic to do the test work for you.
1️⃣ Over-reliance on organic reach: Relying solely on organic social media limits your reach, especially considering platform algorithms favor paid content. This could result in decreased visibility and engagement for your brand. 2️⃣ Time-consuming content creation: Organic social media demands consistent, high-quality content creation to maintain audience engagement. Without paid promotion, achieving significant reach organically requires significant time and effort. 3️⃣ Competitive disadvantage: In today's saturated social media landscape, relying solely on organic methods may put you at a disadvantage against competitors utilizing paid strategies. Paid advertising allows for targeted audience reach and quicker results.
Using organic social as a testing ground for copy and creatives, then allocating budget behind the ideas that resonate most is a winning strategy. Organic social allows us to gauge audience reactions, gather feedback, and fine-tune our messaging without committing significant resources upfront. Once we identify the creatives and copy that perform best organically, we can then allocate a paid advertising budget to amplify their reach and impact. This approach not only minimizes risk but also maximizes the effectiveness of paid campaigns by focusing investment on content proven to resonate with the audience. By combining the strengths of organic and paid social media, we can create a cohesive and data-driven marketing strategy.
Integrated Strategy: Use organic content to build community and engagement while leveraging paid ads to amplify your reach and achieve specific marketing objectives. Content Synergy: Create high-quality organic content that resonates with your audience and use paid promotions to boost the best-performing posts for wider visibility. Budget Allocation: Allocate a portion of your marketing budget to paid social media while continuing to invest time and resources into maintaining a robust organic presence.
Organic social has gone dead on most channels as a response to AI-generated content. Brands must response be doubling down on the human touch. Influencer partnerships. Employee advocacy. Actual two-way engagement. Posting and coasting isn't enough anymore.
💡Consider keeping it on the DL (Destination & Location) for organic social media. Just one approach, however utilizing Tourism of Cities, Hospitality/Resorts, Restaurants, Beaches and/or Entertainment Parks as location or collaboration is one way to help improve organic social media... as they say, location, location, location.
Relying solely on organic social media is risky when it comes to creating sustainable lead generation. Sole reliance on one channel can lead to unstable lead flow, making it hard to predict and sustain growth. With every brand vying for attention on social media, standing out organically becomes increasingly difficult. Organic growth typically takes time, potentially delaying your ability to quickly capitalise on market opportunities. Incorporating organic social media as just one part of a diversified, multichannel marketing strategy enhances reach, mitigates risks, and ensures a steadier flow of leads. This approach allows for greater control and sustainability in your lead-generation efforts.
Stay updated on platform algorithm changes, engage consistently with your audience, and regularly analyze performance metrics to refine your approach.