Over the past couple of years, social media marketing has changed in many different ways. Strategies used to be about creating a genuine and personal experience online with lots of engagement. But more recently social media is involved in the full consumer journey, including the acquisition of consumers, remarketing and retention of current consumers and many other services.

So let’s dig a little deeper into the differences between and benefits of paid social vs organic social media and why it’s important to use a combination of both strategies.

Paid social vs organic social

This is comparatively very similar to organic search vs paid search. Organic social comprises of any social media content that does not have a paid benefit or promotion. It utilises the free social media tools to gain a following and in turn better engagement. 

Paid social refers to anything on social media that you have had to spend money on to boost engagement, e.g. ads or boosted posts. These ads are typically shown to people that are beyond your engagement or people that haven’t interacted with your organically. Cost per click (CPC) is one of the most common methods of charging for this type of promotion. 

To make the best use of your social platform when it comes to gaining consumers and keeping your current consumers content you should use both of these methods simultaneously. This allows you to interact with possible new customers, extending your reach to a broader audience, as well as keeping in touch and updating your current followers. 

The benefits of organic social

• The main benefit that most people will feel is that organic social media is free! 

• Organic social is a good means of communication when speaking to consumers. This will help you to maintain good relationships with current customers. It gives you the ability to reply to customers directly should they have any problems or queries. 

• Take a good note of what your audience is saying, this is an easy way to find things that you can improve on and embrace the opportunity to acknowledge their opinions. 

• You can develop free campaigns using custom hashtags, for example, Nike’s would be #JustDoIt. This can also be useful for time-specific hashtags or deals/offers. E.g. #ASOSSuperSale

• You can also use this to build a community of like-minded people that follow and have the same interests. 

• Organic social makes it a lot easier to develop trust between you and the consumer as well as having full transparency on your business model or product.

• You can also use this to encourage user-generated content. This can always be helpful, especially if you sometimes struggle to find content to post about your business or product. 

The benefits of paid social

• Using only organic versions of social can often be difficult to target new and broader markets. Paid search enables you to break through that barrier and attract a whole new customer base to your business. 

• Also if you have a product or offer that converts at a very high rate to your organic audience your can use paid ads to target a similar audience of people that may not otherwise know about your product or offer.  According to a recent survey, 64% of people will use social media for shopping inspiration, meaning that the majority of your audience will be very receptive to your ad. 

• You can use paid ads to reinforce the core values and messages that your business stand for which will in turn boost your organic growth. 

• With most social platforms paid ad services you can very precisely target a specific audience, meaning that your paid ads shouldn’t ever be wasted and shown to people that will never be interested in your business/product. This is of course depending on how well your initial ad campaigns have been set up. If you need help running your social ads, don’t hesitate to get in contact with us.

Using Paid and organic social together

Complete marketing strategies don’t focus on playing the organic against the paid ad services. Instead, they very efficiently combine the power of the two together to reach the best results. With organic reach continuing to diminish on social platforms, it’s becoming more and more important to use paid social opportunities in your advertising to reach a broader audience of new consumers. Making an impact using solely an organic platform is becoming more and more difficult on social media, on Facebook, for example, an organic post will only be seen by roughly 6.4% of page likes and that’s a number that unfortunately is declining. 

However organic social is still prevalent for ongoing success, although it is in slight decline, the benefits of organic social are still enormous. It provides an immeasurable opportunity for the advertisement of your business for FREE, and to an already loyal following of your business. This is only beneficial though if marketers like us, for example, focus on the quality of the content that is being shown and don’t just bombard your following with a sales pitch in every post. 

To really make the most of your paid advertisements you can experiment and test the best content that you’re posting to your already following organic users. This saves money by not showing ads or information that is not relevant through the paid aspect. You can find the most relevant and best-performing posts through your organic platform and then use those in the paid section to really boost your following or engagement. 

Make sure that no matter what platform you’re using you keep a close eye on analytics to be sure that you know which ads and posts are performing best.