Organic and paid social are often treated as separate channels, but the two are inextricably linked and should be considered symbiotically. In this blog post, our Head of Paid Media, Chris Watson and Matt Rook, Managing Director at Hotwolf, one of our creative agency partners and organic social specialists, discuss the roles of organic and paid social and the importance of a balanced approach.
What is the difference between organic and paid social media?
Paid social involves placing ads on social platforms and the number of formats and conversion actions these ads can have is pretty mind-blowing. Organic social involves all the unpaid social media marketing, including creating content, social media management and social media engagement. Ensuring you have a balance of organic and paid in your social media campaigns will bring you the best social media ROI (Return On Investment).
The role of organic social media
Written by Matt Rook
If there is one immutable truth when it comes to social media, it’s that with every passing year, a brand’s social channels become increasingly important. Social media is the digital high street that cannot be overlooked. As we all increasingly spend our time online and in particular on social media, if a brand wants attention it’s crucial to make sure their channels and content are as attractive (and sticky) as possible.
Carefully thought out, beautifully-crafted social channels offer a relatively unique opportunity for brands: at a relatively low cost, the chance to find an audience, develop long-term relationships and build a community of advocates.
Organic social has another vital USP – unlike almost any other medium, it levels the playing field to such a degree that yesterday’s unknown start-ups can become billion pound companies, competing with the established deep-pocketed brands. Strategy and creativity are no longer the exclusive preserve of blue chip companies alone.
That is, until you introduce paid, of course. But more on this later…
At a macro level, there is arguably one very simple, winning strategy for effective social media management and content creation: put one in place and get posting! Test your strategy, stretch it until breaking, review everything, take on board your learnings and integrate them in next month’s content. Plan/do/review, constantly moving forwards.
At the content level, our experience has led us to a winning approach based on three content pillars: Information, inspiration and validation. Successful channels tend to have a blend of posts that regularly fall within these categories. There are, of course, a plethora of other useful tips and tricks, but probably none more so than this: think of your brand as a person – develop and establish your identity and stick with it. Don’t just shout about your brand or product(s). Equally, don’t jump on every trend – only those that are genuinely relevant to your brand. Stay consistent. Be interesting. Or useful. Or neither… just post content that makes people smile, or in some small way improves that last few seconds of their life, in a way that could only come from your brand.
Well executed organic social content provides a unique opportunity for brands to build a conversation with their customers – existing, new and future. It’s a creative sandbox where brands can try new messages, launch new products and services and get instant feedback on what’s working (and crucially, what’s not). The data captured can then deliver the confidence to know where to deploy media support to maximise success.
The power of paid social media
With a greater proportion of the world turning to social media as a form of inspiration, brand discovery and consideration before ultimate purchase (either through the social media platform itself or other channels), supplementing a strong organic social media strategy with paid activity has become a must for many brands.
With the rise of TikTok and a subsequent shift to ever increasing dominance of User-Generated Content (UGC) online, brands have found themselves increasingly sidelined. As such, boosting organic content through paid activity can help brands reach a wider pool of prospective followers and consumers, enticing them to follow the brand and engage with the organic content.
Beyond increasing organic visibility, social media allows brands to tap into an ever expanding method of brand awareness, consideration and product acquisition. With traditional paid search blossoming into ‘search’ – users are now as likely to turn to social media for inspiration, consideration and purchase as they are to the traditional channels of paid search and SEO. Having a strong paid social proposition has now become paramount for brands looking to diversify their strategy and ensuring that they are present in front of all potential customers no matter what their preferred platform is.
Social media isn’t a homogenous channel, each platform is different, with varying content and ad formats and different purposes for its audience. This presents brands with a golden opportunity to align themselves and their content appropriately with each platform to get the most out of the engaged users. For example, a car insurance brand could use TikTok to engage and entertain its audience, driving brand awareness and favourability. However, they can have more conversion-focussed messaging on Facebook where users are more open to investigating and purchasing from brands advertising on this platform.
As well as different uses/purposes of different social platforms, we can also see a difference in demographics and data collected from users across platforms. This opens up paid social to brands in all sectors, as distinct targeting options mean brands can now cherry pick the ideal mix of platforms to reach their audience. B2B brands will find established opportunities in LinkedIn, where targeting can be based on users’ professional backgrounds and emerging brands can find opportunity in Reddit, where targeting is based on communities known as sub-reddits. Conversely, B2C brands may see success through the interest-based targeting of platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
With differing forms of consumption and demographic spreads, this allows brands to not only think of short term goals of converting their current user base to buyers, but can also enhance brand awareness within younger generations to ensure they remain ahead of the curve compared to their competitors.
Beyond this, all platforms offer extensive data collection and visualisation tools, ensuring marketers are always ahead of the curve in terms of making sure ROI targets are observed and changes are made to ensure that they are hit.
How to combine paid and organic social media
Organic social enhances paid activity
When running paid social, users that are served the ads are very frequently going to click onto a brand’s social profile to get a stronger feeling for their offering, culture and general ethos. As such, a brand without a curated social media profile can fall foul of losing potential customers through this.
Reaching your followers
Organic social allows you to communicate with your followers but only up to a point. Not all followers will see your posts as platforms are increasingly insistent that you should advertise to take the “brakes” off your feed. So even if, as a brand, you don’t run any traditional ads, it’s always worth boosting your organic posts, even if only with tiny budgets – say £20+ per post.
Should you dive straight into paid social?
It’s vital to build up a strong profile to maximise the impact of your paid activity. Whatsmore, posting organic content allows you to trial multiple different marketing angles for your brand, free or at a negligible cost. So you can test, test and test again. Then analyse the data and use this to decide which messages should then be the backbone of your paid advertising (and beyond!).
Closing the gap between organic and paid social
To maximise ROI and the effectiveness of your social channels, ensure you employ strategies that consider the relationship between your organic feed and paid ads. Most obviously, using paid ads to direct people to organic posts – especially useful for driving engagement to competition posts for instance.
Consistency is key… to a point
To maintain creative consistency, we would recommend using the same agency that creates your organic feed to also produce your paid assets. This will ensure ads have the same tone of voice and feel to organic content, but be mindful that unless boosting organic content, these are only viewable to the targeted audience. Don’t be afraid to bend stylistic boundaries set for organic content to maximise performance for paid activity.
Leveraging organic and paid social to drive results for EIT UM
EIT Urban Mobility (EIT UM) is a European Union initiative aimed at hastening the shift towards sustainable mobility. It offers online training courses to enhance the skills of Urban Mobility professionals across Europe. EIT UM approached us with a specific challenge: they had invested substantial resources in creating 50 videos for their ‘WebTV’ YouTube playlist and they needed to ensure these reached their target audience.
Understanding this as a brand awareness task, we utilised YouTube, the second largest search engine, in addition to discovery platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter to meet this goal.
We established a brand-new YouTube channel for these WebTV videos named Urban Mobility Explained (UMX) and set the following objectives, which also encompassed a goal for a lower funnel impact:
- Reach a broad audience of Urban Mobility professionals – measured by video views
- Build and engage a YouTube community – measured by channel subscribers
- Encourage the audience to show interest in EIT UM’s online courses – measured by clicks to the site and course enrolments
The channel launch involved several key activities:
- Setting up and optimising the new YouTube channel to search and Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) best practices
- Optimising all YouTube videos for search, enabling them to rank organically on YouTube and other search engines
- Running paid YouTube campaigns to boost video views and subscriber acquisition
- Promoting the videos and courses organically across social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and the YouTube Community Tab
The outcomes of our brand awareness-driven campaign against set targets were impressive:
- Seven videos achieved over 100,000 views (target: six videos)
- 17 videos reached over 10,000 views (target: 15 videos)
- The YouTube channel gained over 3,700 subscribers (target: 500 subscribers), surpassing the total subscribers of the original EIT UM channel
- Over 4,400 clicks to the site and 21 course enrolments directly attributed to YouTube ads
The combination of paid and organic social here led to these incredible results, as we were able to maximise our reach for our target audience. By removing paid or organic from the equation, we wouldn’t have seen such success and combining these ensured we not only had a well groomed social account and YouTube channel, but we were reaching the large pool of users we needed to.
Social media best practices
Expertise matters
Work with specialists who understand your brand and are best in class for each discipline. So choose a creative agency to make your content and a media planning and buying agency to run your paid social. Furthermore, if you can, choose two agencies that already know and understand one another, as this will definitely make for a smoother working relationship. Spoiler alert – like Hotwolf and Passion!
Don’t skip the groundwork
Before embarking on paid advertising, make sure you’ve established a successful organic strategy. As once you’ve established this, you’ll know your brand identity on social, you’ll have analysed the data to know what maximises engagement and your content pillars have been developed and refined. In short, you’re now perfectly placed to start advertising campaigns, safe in the knowledge that your brand’s social estate is in great health, ready to be promoted to existing and potentially new customers/fans.
Keep measuring
Look at your social media analytics on a weekly basis to ensure performance is consistent with expected results – consider beginning with a broad audience to collect data and then subset the audience into smaller segments to A/B results and creative.
Do a broader review of your data on a monthly basis to understand, learn and discover what’s working and what’s not. Use this knowledge to inform your marketing decisions for future weeks/months.
The size of your audience = your media spend
Proportion your budget based on your audience size. The ideal frequency for paid social campaigns is three, with retargeting campaigns closer to five. Media spend should reflect audience size, audience size should not be pigeonholed into media spend.
Consider your end goal
Spend time thinking about what social media platform will best suit your brand’s needs; what metrics are important and for what reason and then determine which specific platforms will help you reach your goals. When running paid social, look at what social media targeting options would best align to achieving your goals.
Determine what metrics need to be measured and which analytics tools are best placed to measure success; as a baseline we would recommend using the data collected in-platform and linking the platforms through to your preferred analytics platform (e.g. Google Analytics 4, Piwik, etc.).
Utilise first-party data
This is particularly important for paid social. Whilst all social media platforms have extensive targeting options embedded within their marketing platforms, there is really no substitute for using first-party data – particularly for niche brands or brands heavily investing in e-commerce. This can be used both to retarget users to repeat purchase/purchase if they are basket abandoners, as well as using the lists as a seed for prospecting audiences based on similar attributes to capture targeting options not considered.
The future of paid and organic social media
With social media having firmly established itself within the daily lives of a broad segment of the global public and with search evolving to ever-increasingly incorporate social media in user purchasing behaviour, having a strong organic and paid social media presence can only bolster brands’ ability to reach their target audience. This will remain and grow in importance in the future, definitely invest in your paid and organic social media strategy to stay ahead!
We hope that you found our social media tips helpful. Remember, by ensuring that organic media feeds are well curated and frequently posted on, brands can use the platforms to humanise the brand and build community, whilst using paid media activity to ensure visibility and push users further down the buying cycle. Get in touch with us today to discuss how we can elevate your social media strategy using both organic and paid social.