Both organic and paid social media landscapes are constantly evolving, as platforms continue to shrink organic reach to encourage paid sponsorship. Social media is no longer just about engaging in conversation – it’s now a leading channel for acquiring and maintaining customers.
Social media advertising therefore makes the perfect tool to grow brand awareness and reach new customers – whilst organic content helps to keep current followers engaged and your social channels active. Paid ads can allow brands to grow substantially, by channelling an extensive budget directly to a specific, targeted audience. However, if businesses expect growth, they must also consider dedicating resources to growing their social presence organically.
That’s why its important to consider a combination of both organic and paid social, in order to achieve business success on social media. Here we share our top three tips to integrate the two.
1) Ensure your messaging is aligned
While paid and organic social have different purposes, they both share the same goal – growing your brand and reaching a target audience to convey a message. Customers old and new will likely see both your organic and paid social ads at some time, so it’s important they feel the two do not contradict your businesses key principles.
At the very least, your paid and organic social posts should be consistent enough to reflect that they come from a single company. If your messaging and creative seems disconnected, your customers will feel disconnected and confused. Conflicting ‘tone’ could undermine your own advertising efforts on one or multiple social media channels. Even if there is no conflict across platforms, failure to align paid and organic social media efforts will waste time and effort, as well as proving costly in the long-term. Make sure your content is aligned so that they can both work together to deliver results.
2) Boost your best performing organic content
Promoting the content that you know your audience is engaging with from an organic perspective already is the best way to balance organic and paid social. This works on the principal that if your organic content is generating positive engagement from your followers, it’s highly likely that your paid ads will also receive positive engagement from prospective followers with a similar interest.
Due to algorithms, best performing organic content is also favoured when it comes to boosting. So try to make sure you’re putting your best posts forward to boost, as you’ll find your boosting efforts are more successful.
3) Target your paid ads to people with similar attributes to your organic following
The people that engage with your content organically and follow your page are obviously interested in your content and your brand messages. That’s why it’s important that you determine this interested audience before you launch any paid ads, so that you can be sure you know that the people you’re targeting will be interested in your content, or that it will at least be relevant to them. Observing your organic audience, who were with you before paid advertising, can reveal to you the audience that is interested in your brand. Use these insights to inform your targeting, to ensure you’re reaching the right audience through your advertising.
For more interesting articles from us check out these posts:
- Is paid social media worth it?
- The importance of diversity in social media advertising
- Three top tips to help you find the right social media influencers for your brand
At Prohibition, we work with a range of brands across all sectors to create engaging social media marketing strategies that allow brands to stay up to date with the latest trends and updates. Get in contact today to find out how we could help you: hello@prohibitionpr.co.u
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