Social media is one of the largest markets in this Century, It doesn’t matter what kind of business is or even if it’s for your personal interest. The only thing is that social media moves too fast and they also have constant changes.
A long time ago, social media marketing was very different than it is now a days. Marketers could open a page on Facebook, write a bunch of fun posts and watch the fan count go up. But that all changed when Facebook began drastically reducing the reach of organic (nonpaid) posts.
It is essential to create a successful social media marketing strategy to get results. Organic and paid social media have their different pros and cons but of course it works better when implemented together.
Organic
Organic in social media language is when you post something and you don’t pay it to be promoted or to be “boosted”.
Paid
Paid as the name already says is when you pay for your ads reach more people, beyond your ‘followers’. When you pay for your post you and users that get your ad on their timeline will se a “sponsored” tag. If you then “like” that post, that is considered a paid reaction.
Reality vs What business owners think
Mostly of small business owners think that only posting random things and using social media as “free exposure” will be a success to their businness.
To make effective organic social media marketing for a business, takes time and it’s not as easy as some people think. To be honestly, organic reach is declining. If you’ve been managing a Facebook Page for awhile now, you may have noticed that your posts aren’t reaching as many people as before. Because the News Feed is becoming increasingly competitive, Facebook is trying to show content that is the most relevant to them as opposed to content from pages that post frequently.
Right now, the organic reach for Facebook posts is as low as 2 percent, and the social media giant plans to reduce that percentage even more in the future. That means that for a Page with 100,000 likes, only 2,000 people will see your posts (based on the 2 percent figure.) That’s rough.
Paid media, on the other hand, has proven to be extremely effective for companies that are trying to grow and expand their reach through social media.
Keep in mind that growing a social media audience takes a lot of time, hard work, and hours of seemingly talking to no one.
Organic social media is vital for building and nurturing relationships with both your current and potential customers. Everything from answering questions to responding to comments can help you build your reputation and establish yourself as a brand that cares about its customer’s needs. Paid social media, on the other hand, is essential for creating brand awareness and getting as many conversions as possible in the shortest amount of time.
However, you need to remember that even the biggest budget or perfectly segmented audience can’t work without organic content. Just put yourself in your audience’s shoes for a moment and imagine that you’ve come across a paid social media campaign that catches your eye. You click on the sponsored post and end up on the company’s profile. You scroll through their posts and notice that they barely have any content. You’re not able to learn anything about the company, so you just leave without taking any action.
Many page owners think that organic reach (the number of unique individuals who see your post pop up in their news feeds) is enough to make an impact. This was true in the first few years of Facebook but is no longer the case. Facebook, and many other social media networks is truly a pay-to-play network. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are all on algorithmic feeds, meaning posts are shown to the user based on past behavior and preferences instead of in chronological order. Organic posts from your Facebook page only reach about 2% of your followers, and that number is dropping. Facebook recently announced that, in order to correct a past metrics error, it is changing the way it reports viewable impressions, and organic reach will be 20% lower on average when this change takes effect.
Use a mix of both organic and paid social for the best results.
Joice Koga 