“Paid social gets new leads, while organic social gets those leads to stay, engage, and become an active customer. This is why you need a healthy balance for a sustainable strategy!”

In the world of social media marketing, the secret to maximizing results is not as simple as choosing between either organic content or paid social advertising. Although I’ll let you in on the true secret… it’s both! 

Organic and paid social media each offer their own unique ways of providing value, depending on your business’ overall social media marketing strategy. For this reason, it’s important to dig deeper into what each can do for your business individually, and how the successful integration of both can help your business thrive.

Why is Organic Social Media Important?

Try viewing your social presence the same way as your website: a platform that potential customers visit to seek information and brand validation. With organic social media, your content is posted and displayed on your social media pages, appears on your followers’ feeds, and reaches your existing audience or followers and those they share it with.

If maintaining a strong social presence and building a valuable connection with your followers sound something like your social media marketing strategy, then this is a well-suited approach for you. 

Here are more opportunities that lie within organic social media:

• Build a sustainable connection with your customers
• Establish a brand identity  
• Reach your existing audience (followers)
• Maintain a strong brand presence
• Provide support to your customers/audience
• Gain followers by your audience sharing posts with others (this is why quality, sharable content is so important)

Organic social allows you to thrive in terms of creating a space where your existing audience can engage and share content with their followers; but how do you lead new customers to this space and grow this audience at a faster rate?

That’s where the other piece of the puzzle comes in: paid social.

Why is Paid Social Media Important?

By investing in paid social advertising, your business is guaranteed to be seen.

Paid social advertising is content that’s displayed on social media feeds as promoted, has a budget behind it, and reaches a newer, wider, and targeted audience. The most common payment models for paid social are pay-per-click and impression-based advertisements:

• • With the pay-per-click (PPC) model, you only pay once your advertisement has been interacted with directly; such as a click.
  • Impression-based advertisements charge you based on the number of times an advertisement is shown to your target audience.

Although organic content is more cost-efficient, by putting a budget behind your advertising campaigns, you can see more immediate results and drive sales.

Here are some of the many advantages of paid social advertising:

• • Reach a new and wider audience in a shorter amount of time
  • Ability to target your ideal customer
  • Generate web traffic and drive sales with a strong call to action (CTA)
  • Generate immediate results
  • Appear on social media platforms and search engines

Similarly, there is an existing option that integrates both worlds of organic and paid social: boosting or boosted posts. Let’s say you posted content organically on your social media page, there’s one post performing well in comparison to others, and you want a chance to have it appear on social media feeds beyond your existing followers… that’s where boosting comes in. By boosting a post you can put a budget behind it, place the desired post(s) on the feed of users who don’t already follow your page, drive more traffic to your posts and social page, and more! In a way, you’re taking a well-performing organic social post and turning it into a paid social advertisement.

Paid social gets new leads, while organic social gets those leads to stay, engage, and become an active customer. This is why you need a healthy balance for a sustainable strategy! 

Why Your Business Needs Both to Drive Results

With organic and paid social each offering their own world of opportunities, it can be difficult for your business to maximize results by relying on one, without the other.

If you want your business to generate the best results, you need a successful integration of a paid and organic social media strategy so your business can attract and reach beyond its existing audience, while satisfying and connecting with your customers. At the end of the day, it’s all about what best matches the goals of your business’ social media marketing strategy; whether you choose to use organic, paid social, or the ideal combination of both.