Letters spell out social media for organic and paid social media blog post

Organic vs. Paid Media: What You Need To Know

In Social Media by Tyler Mehigh

To build a successful marketing strategy, you need to understand the advantages of organic vs. paid social media. Both are used in very different ways, and each one is necessary to building and maintaining your audience. 

Here’s the way Michigan Creative breaks it all down:

Organic

Organic social media is content the brand regularly creates to provide insight and tell their company’s story. It’s an easy way for your audience to know who you are as a company. They can see a consistent voice, a wealth of knowledge, and they can determine how you can help them. The goal for organic social media is to connect with your audience and act as a friendly guide. When the time is right, they’ll find your company page. The easier you can provide them with the information or solution they’re looking for, the better. A few examples of organic social media include blogs, photos, videos, and fun posts that show your brand to your followers.

Paid

Companies can’t rely on organic posts alone. When businesses want their message to find the individual rather than the other way around, they use paid social media. This is similar to any other paid advertising. Paid social media posts are content the brand spends money on to place in front of their new audiences. They should grab the targeted demographic’s attention and address the pain points of their usual customer. Paid social media posts can be content that performed well when posted originally or content created specifically for new audiences. 

Combined Effort

Without stellar organic content, your brand can be underwhelming and ineffective at grabbing your audience’s attention, even with paid advertising. If a customer visits your social media page and finds a lack of information, you’ll be unsuccessful at moving that customer through the sales funnel.

This doesn’t mean that paid media is unimportant. Paid media is much more efficient at scaling than organic social media is. Once the organic side is strong enough, paid media can push the content to new individuals that have not yet engaged with your brand.

When a brand is younger and less established on the media side, focus on creating an organic social media presence first. Once the content is aligned with the brand image, paid media can scale the brand’s audience to a much larger crowd. As you implement both, you’ll see that it really isn’t organic vs. paid social content, but organic and paid social.

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