Understanding the role of organic vs paid social media strategy

Paid vs organic social media strategy: Your planning essentials

Both organic and paid social media landscapes are constantly evolving. New networks rise to prominence (e.g. TikTok), new technology increases user participation and real-time content (e.g. Periscope) and existing networks enhance their platform and product (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram launching ‘buy’ buttons).

In 2022, organic reach is also continuing to shrink as the leading networks ramp up their paid social media channels to monetize platform investment. Now more than ever, marketers need to research and optimize the right organic and paid media options to achieve their goals.

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If the first era of social was engagement, the new era is acquisition and conversion. Social commerce has been growing over the last few years, but in today's climate that growth has rocketed. Many retailers I work with today are seeing social driving bigger % increases in retail traffic than any other channel.

With 2.9 billion active monthly users and counting, Facebook is still the leading social media platform and is significantly contributing to the rise of social commerce. It is predicted that in 2022, one in three users will make a purchase on Facebook.

Social is no longer just about conversation and content; it’s now an established channel for customer acquisition, remarketing and engaging existing fans/customers to support retention programs. It may be relatively immature compared to search and email marketing but it’s a channel in which most e-commerce teams are ramping up investment (people and tools).

So, this article is designed to help you leverage organic and paid social media when planning your social media strategy.

Defining organic and paid social media marketing

This is for people new to social media, if you already understand what each means, skip to the next section.

Organic social media

Using free tools provided by each social network to build a social community and interact with it, sharing posts and responding to customer comments.

For example, using Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule and publish tweets on Twitter is organic. You may pay for a license to use Hootsuite or Buffer, put there is no charge from Twitter for publishing your tweets.

Paid social media

Paying to display adverts (whatever the format – text, image, video, carousel etc.) or sponsored messages to social network users based on user profile e.g. demographic. A cost is incurred depending on the type of ad planned; for example, many ads incur a cost per click (cpc).

“Many ecommerce practitioners are familiar with the pay-per-click model from their dealings with search engines, however whilst many paid social campaigns will also charge on a per-click basis the path to conversion may not be as direct as with search, if transactional at all.

Whilst the targeting capabilities of paid social are beyond doubt, marketers need to be aware of the different mind-set of social users when compared to that of a user conducting a transactional search query, and should use this to tailor their messaging.

Paid social adds another channel to an already crowded and fragmented conversion funnel, keeping track of return on investment is key.”

Stuart Kerr, Head of Digital at Liberty Games @stukerr

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Do people really buy from social content/offers?

Research from Crowdtap revealed 64% of 3,000 people surveyed use social to find inspiration for shopping (up 51% vs. prior year)

This is driven by retailers targeting consumers with personalised offers and deals on social networks:

• Nearly half (46%) of social media users are already using social platforms while thinking about making a purchase.
• 40% of users are actively deciding what to buy based on what they have seen on social media platforms, including reviews and recommendations, and this is only set to grow.

Clearly social commerce is already the present, not the future. It’s expected that buying through social media will only increase.

Smart Insights has a wealth of marketing training and tools designed for channel marketers to upskill and develop their knowledge as well as strategy and planning resources for those who manage them. Since all our Smart Insights marketing solutions are integrated across the RACE Framework, you can confidently track and adapt the journeys which you know deliver the best results, integrated across multiple channels.

So, let’s look at how organic and paid social media activity support 4 key social media marketing activities.

Listening, learning and responding

Organic social is ideal for community management. You don’t need paid social media campaigns to listen to what people are saying about/to you.

However, you can use paid social campaigns to reinforce core messages that you’ve shared via organic posts. For example, if the company has been involved in a public crisis (think Volkswagen and the emissions crisis), then information you’ve provided to people who have contacted you can be used as part of a wider educational marketing program with paid ads to extend the message reach.

What’s important is that the listening and learning elements are part of your organic approach to social media; they should happen naturally by being actively involved with your community. If you’re not responding effectively on a personal level to enquiries and complaints, a paid program may attract further criticism.

Creating conversations based on a unifying thread

Social marketers look for ways to engage groups of people based on a shared interest/passion. Whilst one-to-one communication is the much-touted holy grail of social marketing, the impact and efficiency of communicating to a wider audience simultaneously is important to understand.

Hashtags are a great example. You can create a hashtag for free, or simply dovetail with an existing hashtag if what you’re doing/saying is relevant to that audience.

By using a hashtag for a specific conversation, you can unify all posts into a searchable thread that helps individuals to be part of the conversation and follow what others are saying. It also helps foster new connections, as like-minded people can find each other based on a shared interest/passion.

Below is an example from RedBull, masters of content marketing and community building.

Here’s a great write-up from Michael Patterson of 7 examples of successful hashtag campaigns.

Here's a personal experience of this. Along with ecommerce consultant Dan Barker, I launched EcomChat in 2013, a weekly Twitter chat on all things ecommerce based around the #EcomChat hashtag. It has achieved the following:

• Provided a great way to connect with ecommerce and digital marketing specialists
• Built a community that wants to share knowledge and learn from others
• People now use the hashtag to share interesting ecommerce news outside the chat and ask questions/share information
• People have made new connections and this has led to collaboration for ecommerce projects
• More than 1,450 ecommerce and digital marketing followers.

It doesn’t cost a penny to run the chat, other than our time, and it has created a highly engaged mini-community on Twitter.

Using social media for content marketing

A content plan should sit above all your marketing channels, defining the key stories and when they play.

Social media can then be used to help tell these stories, whether it’s through one-off announcements (e.g. Facebook post), or a series of short posts that build the story over time (e.g. series of blogs, each being shared on key networks).

You can also use organic to increase audience engagement with your content. For example, let’s say you’re a ticketing website for sporting events and you know that some of your followers are rugby fanatics. If you have a new blog interviewing Dylan Hartley (current England captain), then it makes sense to personally contact them (or at least key influencers) via their preferred social network and tell them about the blog, and ask them to comment/share. It’s personal and increases the chance they’ll see/read your content.

Of course, you need to be pragmatic about how many people you can contact individually. There is a resource implication but the scale of this can grow overtime as you learn what impact it has. Typically this is a core organic marketing competency of a Community Manager.

You don’t need to pay to share, but you do need an audience. When first starting out, you’ll have few people to talk to via social, so the relative impact of your content will be low (unless you have a few amazing influencers whose sharing of your content resonates with a far larger audience).

The example below is from Liberty Games paying to promote content via Facebook ads:

Paid social media can help amplify organic content, using social network advertising tools to target the audience. Using the rugby example, on Facebook you could target people who like other leading rugby fan pages. I recommend testing paid social campaigns to promote key content assets like reports and highlight important news/announcements. With a small budget you can quickly measure amplification impact.

I’ve done this successfully myself, for example using sponsored Twitter ads to promote events for a crowdfunding startup, which helped sell tickets and increase followers. I started with a £100 budget and then expanded based on results.

Micro-targeting people using paid social campaigns

Targeting based on interest

You can target people based on self-identified interests. For example, if you are selling pet accessories, you can specifically target social media users who have expressed an interest in pets. Marketers doing this typically experience higher CTR and conversion for social ads than for blanket campaigns.

Social media remarketing

You should get to grips with Remarketing lists. Remarketing involves marketing to people who have already visited your website, then promoting relevant content/offers based on the context of their visit.

A good example is Facebook Custom Audiences. Within this Facebook supports email targeting, the ability to upload customer email addresses and then target those users on Facebook with tailored ads. This lets you micro-segment based on your existing customer database. One application is customer loyalty marketing, promoting offers to existing high value users via Facebook ads.

The challenge here is to know your own audience. If you have a good CRM database and can profile and segment meaningfully, then you can export highly targeted lists to social media for advertising.

Lookalike audiences

The ability to upload customer lists into social advertising accounts lets you create look alike audiences – so targeting other users on the social network who closely match your existing customers.

This taps into a core acquisition marketing principle, the aim to understand core audience profiles and then invest in campaigns that appeal to others matching those criteria.

Digital media options cheatsheet

Our Digital media cheatsheet is aimed at helping Smart Insights members to keep track of the free and paid media options so that they're not missing out on any of the latest developments.

Access the Latest digital media updates tracker

Thanks to James Gurd for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. James is an experienced ecommerce and digital marketing consultant with more than 14 years’ B2C and B2B digital strategy and transformation experience. He is the Owner and lead consultant at Digital Juggler. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.