Since businesses have been so separated from their customers, learning as much as you can about social media strategy can be a really big help for any organization.
Let’s start with organic versus advertising versus boosting posts. You’ll see up here on the top next to the title, I decided to throw in little tidbits and stuff – little factoids about social media, kind of all the platforms that I found particularly interesting. And they’ll go just be a new one on each slide.
So organic visibility is really what one starts out doing. You treat your Facebook business page or your Instagram account like you would your own Facebook or Instagram account. You’re just posting, you’re trying to start conversations and you’re just trying to get some free visibility.
Social Media Strategy Pros & Cons
One of the pros of an organic social media strategy is that you have fewer content restrictions. Anyone that’s tried to run ads on a social media platform knows that you’ll get some pushback, depending on what type of content or what you’re trying to sell. In a lot of cases, when marketing things like housing and credit, you’ll run into issues with limited visibility and limited targeting options. But when it’s organic, you can – within reason – pretty much say anything.
The cons are that you’re going to get slower results when it comes to audience growth or conversions, you’ll get slow to hardly any traction. By the way, a lot of these platforms are designed – like the little factoid up here at the top says – a typical business post is only seen by 2% of the page’s followers.
And to put that into context, let’s say you have a hundred followers on your company’s Facebook page. And all 100 of those people have their phones in front of them, you publish a post and all 100 of those refresh their feed. After you publish, only two people are going to see what you just posted and there are tons of reasons behind that.
Some say it’s because it’s a money grab by Facebook. Others say it’s because we people don’t use Facebook to be sold to, so Facebook really limits that organic visibility.
Either way, organic visibility is going to provide you slower results, and that 2% visibility has been decreasing and diminishing over time. I remember back in like 2012 you had about 6% visibility and it just keeps going down now.
With paid advertising, on the other hand, you get visibility and detailed targeting. You can go after certain audiences, geographies groups – it opens that whole world of targeting for you. You also get improved tracking. So, if you’re tracking your website traffic on Google Analytics or using some other type of tracking mechanism, you’re going to be able to tell which ad the people coming from, which set of ads, even which campaign the people are coming from. You get better analytics through paid advertising since it opens up your audience, you’re getting quicker results because more people are seeing more people are engaging in higher levels of conversions.
But with that, it does cost money. It’s not necessarily a ton of money, but you are putting a budget on it.
Watch/listen to the rest of the webinar above. To get a custom social media strategy that makes the most of organic and paid content, schedule a call with us today!
