Social Media Marketing has many facets and nuances that are unique to each and every industry and business. But when you’re using social media to build a network in which you share information that in turn grows your company’s brand, increases traffic to your website and can often lead to higher sales, it helps to put some best practices into play.
First of all, how do we define these terms?
Organic Social Media Marketing is content that you share on your business social media platforms without attaching any ad spend to them. This includes posts, images, videos, Reels, Stories, YouTube Shorts, etc. This content can be found by the audience that currently follows you and has the potential to be found by new followers if your organic approach encourages people to share your content or recommend your platforms and pages.
Paid Social Media Marketing is content that you share on your business social media platforms that you add an additional monetary spend to increase reach and *hopefully* increase sales of your products or services. This includes posts that you boost or set up as an ad only as well as those times you pay influencers to market your business.
So, which should you do: focus on an organic approach or use paid ads to get your brand out there in the universe?
The short answer is: do both.
Start with a robust organic campaign that captures your audience’s attention, answers their questions, promotes how your product or service can benefit them and use it to entertain them from time to time. Although it’s kind of a simple strategy, the kicker is that often you’ll put in a lot of effort to be seen by just a very small percentage of your current followers. But that’s ok. If you create content that even a small group of people enjoys and finds useful, they will become your loyal spokespeople; sharing and commenting and engaging, which grows the organic reach.
Here are some ways to support your organic strategy:
- Post in Stories. Followers of your accounts will be fed Stories as a sort of slideshow. Non-followers can see your Stories (if your page is public) but they will not automatically feed into their Stories.
- Use hashtags on Instagram that you know or Reels on both Facebook and Instagram that you know or suspect your potential clients will follow. For example, people who buy kitchen ware are probably following cooking, baking, and food adjacent hashtags.
- Encourage shares of your content. It’s much smoother works better if your shares are natural, but the occasional ask is ok, too. Finding that perfect “viral” video will really help you with this, but sometimes you just have to keep posting until that magical post happens.
Now, how to begin a successful paid social media campaign?
The number one rule for creating ads is to put money on what is already working. If you have a post that has gotten a lot of engagement, comments, shares or questions put some money on that.
Another great tip for ads on social media is to run a report on your website first and determine where your traffic is coming from. Decide if you want more of that or if you want to increase traffic from another area. In the beginning, keep your locations to a minimum until you test out what’s working.
Speaking of testing, a strong ad strategy always includes reporting. After you run your first ad, look back on it. How many clicks, reach, calls, likes, etc. did you get out of it? Are you happy with it? Should you tweak it a bit? Could you repeat what you did but in another location? Should you try changing up your concept? There are a lot of variables, but you’ll start to hone in on what is working if you keep reviewing the data.
Don’t forget that your Social Media Strategy can have many moving parts. If you feel like you need to hash it out with the social media experts here at Green T Design, we’d love the opportunity to review what you’re doing, what you could do better and even just take care of the ad work for you so you can get back to business!
