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Organic vs Paid Social Media: How to Leverage Both

Madison Fraitag

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When it comes to using social media for your business, it can be easy to think about it in the same way you think about your personal accounts. You upload a video or post a piece of content organically and wait to see how your audience engages with it. But there’s also a world of opportunity when it comes to paid social.

2021-02 PaidVsOrganicSocial Blog

How do you know when to post organically and when to pay to get your content in front of a wider audience? What type of content should you post organically and what type should you run as an ad? The purpose of this guide is to answer those questions and ease some of the confusion around paid vs. organic social content.

Click on the links in the Table of Contents below to jump to a specific section of the guide. If you prefer watching to reading, check out the video below!

What we’ll cover

Defining paid vs. organic social media

We’ll start by defining paid social and organic social. The difference is simple: Organic social content is posted for free. Paid social content is shared with spend behind it to help you reach a larger audience.

Organic social posts will show up on the Feeds of people that already follow you. Your posts will be shown to more people as your audience shares and engages with them.

Paid social posts will show up in the Feeds of whichever audience you decide to target with your ad. You can target audiences based on demographics, location, interests, and more.

The worlds of paid and organic content can cross paths as well. For instance, you can pay to "boost" an organic post to get it in front of more people. This is often an effective strategy for organic posts that are performing particularly well. We’ll share more about that in our section on using Facebook Ads Manager vs. boosting.

Understanding organic social

Now that we’ve covered the basics of what organic and paid social media are, let’s take a closer look at organic social. In this section, we’ll dive into the value of posting organically and what types of content you should be sharing. Plus, we’ll share some tips and best practices for posting organic social content.

Why post organic social content?

When you’re getting ready to post a new video or other piece of content on social, the first thing to ask yourself is, "Do I want to reach existing customers or new customers?" If you want to reach existing customers, and those customers are following you on social, then organic should do the trick.

It’s also important to remember that your organic posts come together to essentially form a social website. They validate your brand for potential customers who are deciding whether or not to do business with you–and more and more people are looking to social to learn about brands.

According to our survey of 1000 consumers, 58% of people say they visit a brand’s social pages before visiting their website. And that’s an 81% increase from the previous year. When these consumers visit your social pages, it’s the organic content you’ve shared that they’ll see.

Consumers visiting social media before website

Best practices for posting organically

Ready to post organically? Here are a few best practices to keep in mind:

  • Minimize your promotions. Save the sales talk for your ads. Instead of focusing on getting people to buy, focus on sharing content that your followers and prospects will find valuable. Tell stories, educate, and inspire with your organic content. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to throw in a special promo for your loyal followers every once in a while. But these promos should be mixed in with valuable content that’ll help viewers get to know you, trust you, and feel connected to you.
  • Maximize your personality. While you’re minimizing sales talk and promotions, take the opportunity to showcase who you are. Show off the people behind your business, your company values, and your passions as a brand.
  • Reinforce your brand. Speaking of brand, your organic content is a great opportunity to reinforce your brand. What do you want people to know? Take a look at your social pages and see if those things come across in your existing content. If not, create content that showcases what you do and what you stand for. Make sure it’s clear right at the top of your social profiles.

Here are a couple of examples of videos that work well for reinforcing your brand and helping viewers connect with and trust you. They also both happen to be templates that you can customize to make your own in minutes.

The first is a personal story shared by a fitness professional, but can easily be customized for any industry. This type of story can really help your customers feel like you "get" them.

USE THIS TEMPLATE

This video template is designed for introducing your company values to your audience. It does a great job of showcasing what your brand stands for and highlighting the people behind the post.

USE THIS TEMPLATE

With organic social, you post and wait for things to happen. But paid social guarantees that you'll get seen. In this section, we'll take a look at the benefits of running paid campaigns on social. Plus, we'll share some tips and best practices for paid social ads.

If you're just getting started, paid social might feel daunting, but it can be a fantastic way to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and generate sales. It does take a little more know-how than the organic side of things, but it’s a skill worth adding to your toolbelt.

Boosting, which we'll talk about in the next section, is an easy way to test the waters. But for more control over your ads—and better results—we recommend you give Facebook Ads Manager a try. You can learn more in our guide on how to use Facebook Ads Manager.

Why invest in paid social?

The number of consumers that are making purchases after seeing ads on social is growing. In fact, 24% more consumers made a purchase after seeing a paid social ad in the past year than they did in the previous year.

Businesses are noticing and investing in this increased success with social ads, with 96% of marketers reporting placing ad spend on a video, and 91% saying they're satisfied with the return of their social video marketing, according to our survey.

Best practices for paid social ads

Check out the following tips to get the most out of your social ad campaigns:

  • Target the right audience. What makes social ads so effective? The targeting! The right messaging paired with the right audience can drive incredible results. To figure out the best audience for your business, check out our 8 questions to help you target the right audience.
  • Share a clear call to action. Be direct with what you want viewers to do next by including a strong and clear call to action (CTA). If you're trying to drive sales, encourage them to "buy now." You could even include a limited-time special offer to add urgency. For more on CTAs, check out our article on writing calls to action that get clicks.
  • Keep it short. Your social ads will be displayed in the Feed for people that may not know who you are and aren't actively looking to engage with content from your brand. That's why it's important to keep your video or messaging short and to the point. Share a message that will resonate with the audience you're targeting–and get it across quickly. We recommend keeping video ads to 15-30 seconds at most.
  • Always be testing. If at first you don't succeed, try again. Test different messaging, different imagery, and different calls to action to improve upon your results.

Need a little help getting started? You're in luck! We've got a whole collection of video templates designed for paid promotions, including product promo templates and service promo templates. This Bite-sized Product Intro template is one of our most popular.

USE THIS TEMPLATE

Once you get the hang of things, you’ll be able to target your audience at the top, middle, and bottom of your marketing funnel. Even better, we’ve got templates for all three. Check them all out in the Product Promotion category on our template selector.

MAKE A VIDEO

Facebook Ads Manager vs. boosting

If you’re just getting started with paid social, you may wonder what the difference is between using Facebook Ads Manager and simply boosting your organic posts.

Boosting offers an easy way to get started with advertising on Facebook and Instagram. You can promote any post that you shared organically by clicking on the Boost Post button. This will give you access to a basic version of Facebook Ads Manager, where you can set an objective, include an optional CTA button, and select an audience.

boost-post-facebook

While boosting is an easy way to get started, Ads Manager allows you to get much more granular with your targeting and settings. That’s why we recommend using Ads Manager for setting up your paid campaigns.

When do we recommend boosting? When you have an organic post that’s performing particularly well. Boosting for a small amount of money—even just a few dollars—can help performant posts get even more reach and engagement.

Deciding where to post

Not sure which platform to use for your organic or paid social posts? The first thing to ask yourself is, where is your audience?

If you already have a large audience on a particular social platform, that’s the place you should be posting organically. If you don’t have a large social following yet but you’re looking to grow your audience, choose the platforms where your target audience is spending most of their time. You may know this from your own customer research. If not, check out our infographic detailing where audiences are watching, discovering, and buying by generation on social media.

LEARN MORE

When it comes to paid social, do a test! Try posting the same paid social ad to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or whatever other platforms make the most sense for your business. Spend the same amount of money, target the same audience, and see which drives the best results!

We should also mention that YouTube is rearing its head as one of the most effective places to post video ads—and it’s underutilized! Take advantage of this potential, you may just find an audience you never knew you were missing.

Resources

We shared a lot of links throughout this guide. In this section, we've compiled them all. Plus, we've included a few more useful guides to help you get the most out of your social efforts—whether you're posting organically or paying to run ads.

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