Social media is an incredibly valuable marketing channel for businesses. A simple post can introduce new people to your brand, engage your existing audience and lead to sales all at once. 

But for the best results, you want to implement a serious social media marketing strategy. This usually leads businesses to ask the question of whether to go with organic vs paid social media as their dedicated campaign.

This guide will help you understand the differences between these two options and work out which would work better for your business.

Organic Social Media

When we say Organic social media, we’re talking about the free, non-ad based content that is shared on different social platforms.

This content can range from pictures shared on Instagram to long-form pieces shared on LinkedIn. The specific form of content doesn’t matter, the point is that it needs to be content that can be posted for free.

The point of creating organic social content is to engage and grow your audience in a natural way through high-quality content that resonates with your brand, which is exactly what our CEEK content creation service does.

Benefits of Organic Social Media

The obvious benefit is that organic social media is a free strategy. There is no cost to post your content, which means you are only limited by the amount of content you are able to produce.

Organic content is also the best tool to engage with your existing audience. These posts encourage comments and reactions, which allows your brand to directly respond to customers.

The ability to directly respond is the most authentic communication you could get from your target audience.

Drawbacks of Organic Social Media

Organic social media’s biggest strength is also its largest drawback. Being free to post on social media means there is, within limits, no barrier to entry, so your brand is trying to stand out in an extremely saturated market. That is where bespoke marketing strategies come into play to dominate the competition and stand out in the market.

With so many users posting, various social media platforms have built advanced algorithms to decide which content to surface; these algorithms change constantly, meaning your organic reach could change rapidly from day to day.

Even if you do everything right with your organic social media strategy, you still won’t see results overnight. Organic social media is a long term strategy which can certainly have long running benefits, but isn’t a focus if you need to start making sales straight away.

Paid Social Media

As the name suggests, paid social media involves paying for your content to be shown directly to your chosen audience without having to worry about the whims of an algorithm.

This typically means running ads on a social platform, but strategies like boosting organic posts is also a form of paid social media. At CEEK, we use bespoke paid media strategies to ensure your paid social campaign returns tangible results.

Benefits of Paid Social Media

The clear benefit here is that you get to effectively skip the line and get your message placed directly in front of your target audience. 

Most platforms give you a set of advanced segmentation tools that allows you to obtain a laser focus on your target audience and ensure that only the target audience you want are seeing your ads.

Paid social media is typically much better for direct sales and conversions. You are not looking to engage your audience, you are trying to make them act. This ‘act’ could be a direct purchase, signing up to an email list or moving to the next step of your lead generation process.

Drawbacks of Paid Social Media

Unfortunately, if you want to skip the queue, you have to pay a price. You need to be able to commit a budget and depending on your cost per acquisition (CPA), you may need to spend more than you think.

While ads may be producing great results, the moment you stop spending on ads, these results will fall away. Unlike organic content, the shelf-life of paid social content is very short.

Combining Organic and Paid Social Media

If you’re still wracking your brain over which is the better option between organic and paid social content, we believe the answer comes in combining the two.

Organic social media campaigns are fantastic for building and engaging an audience. It gives you the opportunity to define your brand and find the followers that would best resonate with it.

But once you combine an engaged audience with paid social content, you’ll tap into the true value of social media marketing.  These two strategies together will create an incredible growth engine which will see your audience and sales grow in tandem, fuelling each other to even greater heights.

Summary

Both organic and paid social media are valid marketing tactics that can provide tangible results to your business. Organic is fantastic for growing and engaging your audience, while paid is best for direct conversions like sales and leads. But the best companies see success by combining these two strategies and allowing them to work together. 

Elite brands use social media marketing to reach customers and make sales they never thought were possible. Contact us today to see how CEEK can deliver these results for your business.