Social media is one of the most effective tools for raising awareness, engaging more customers, and growing your leads. 65.7% of the global population is active social media users. However, with ever-changing algorithms and increasing competition for attention, simply posting organic content won’t help you reach your audience. This is where paid advertising comes into play. Social ad spending is increasing and nearing $300B globally.
A well-balanced strategy uses the strength of both approaches to increase your reach and engagement within budget. According to a report, organic search drives more than 50% of all website traffic, while paid ad drives 15% traffic.
In this article, we’ll learn what organic and paid media are, the difference between them, and how to balance between them!
What is organic social media and paid media?
Before understanding how to create a balance between paid and social media, etc. Let us understand what paid and organic social media are.
- Organic Social Media: It refers to the content that businesses post on their social media profile without paying for promotion. It includes posts, interactions, and stories with followers that are not boosted through paid advertising. It is important for building a brand’s voice, building a sense of community, and maintaining relationships with customers.
- Paid Social Media: Paid social media means spending money to promote content, run advertisements, and boost posts on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. Paid campaigns are highly targeted and allow businesses to target relevant and specific audiences based on demographics, interests, purchasing behaviour, etc, that align with your marketing goal.
Organic efforts are important for nurturing existing audiences and building authenticity. At the same time, paid strategies can boost your reach and drive traffic and conversion. To yield the best results, you must create a balance between organic and paid social media.
Difference Between Organic and Paid Social Media
The main difference between organic and paid social media can be differentiated in the ways such as reach, distribution, cost, targeting, speed, purpose, and analytics. We can compare these two in each category.
Cost
- Organic Social Media: Free promotion
- Paid Social Media: Paid promotion
Distribution
- Organic Social Media: Algorithm-driven
- Paid Social Media: Audience-driven
Reach
- Organic Social Media: Depends on engagement
- Paid Social Media: It has a broader reach, depending on budget and audience criteria
Speed
- Organic Social Media: Builds over time
- Paid Social Media: Fast and instant reach
Analytics
- Organic Social Media: Track audience behaviour through interactions such as impressions, engagement and interactions such as comments and DMs.
- Paid Social Media: Provide more insightful data related to conversion metrics, click-through and optimise your ad cost
Best For
- Organic Social Media: Building relationships and brand recognition
- Paid Social Media: Lead generation, boost conversion and scale reach
Targeting
- Organic Social Media: It is limited to the platform’s followers and algorithms
- Paid Social Media: You can target an audience based on interest, behaviour, and demographics.
How to Create a Balanced Social Media Strategy
Here are some of the ways you can balance organic and paid social media
- Align Objectives: Paid and organic are often operated by different teams with different KPIs. A campaign’s paid content should align with what’s resonating organically and vice versa. For a much clearer understanding, teams should share their learning, insights and KPIs across teams.
- Usage: Organic posts are best for low cost testing ground. You can monitor reactions, comments and shares to see what content resonates with them. You can use organic for gaining insights. Then you can use paid social media to further boost the top-performing content to enhance its reach. Paid is used for scaling.
- Cross-Functional Content: Craft content that can be used by both organic and paid social media. For example, a short-form video highlighting product use can drive engagement organically and conversion when repurposed in ads. Prioritise format versatility and creative agility.
- Build Community & Convert: Organic social media helps in building trust. Use it to answer questions, share behind-the-scenes content and start a conversation. Use paid ads to retarget engaged users with CTAs that help in converting.
- Invest in Unified Reporting: One big challenge is attribution. Build a dashboard that measures the combined impact of paid and organic efforts on brand lift, conversion and engagement. Unified data leads to smarter decisions.
A perfect strategy balances organic and paid social media. Organic social media helps in building trust, authenticity and community over time, while paid delivers scale, speed and precision. You can never prioritise or select one over the other. You should find a perfect balance between organic and paid social media. When these strategies align, brands gain visibility, build strong relationships and boost sales. Lumia 360 provides creative social media marketing solutions that can grow your business. Our social media solutions can help you in crafting engaging content, grow your leads and increase online visibility. To know more about our strategies, email info@lumia360.com or call 514-668–599.
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