It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that Paid and Organic Social Media complement each other like peanut butter and jelly. One alone is good, but when used alongside one another, the result is delightful.

Allow me to break it down to the basics for you: Organic Social Media is best used for brand awareness. It’s the no-expense way to capture new business opportunities at the top of the funnel. Your presence on organic social media, when done well, nurtures your existing audience and reaches new people through thoughtful, fun, and engaging content. Here are a few key questions to keep in mind when building your organic social media presence:

1. Where is your audience most active? If your focus is on business-to-business advertising, you should focus on LinkedIn. On the other hand, if you’re an e-commerce brand targeting Gen Z then Instagram and TikTok are your new best friends. Always define your audience before creating and posting content. This will ensure you’re reaching the right people in the right places. 
2. What is your brand voice? Consistency is key in organic social. Your brand’s tone of voice will help drive your content strategy. Decide how you will communicate on organic social media, whether silly, relatable, or formal, and stick to it. Your brand recognition depends on it.
3. Are you prepared to engage with your audience? A sometimes forgotten, but imperative piece of organic social is community engagement. You should be speaking with your audience via comments (yours and theirs), in your direct messages, and also liking and re-sharing user-generated content. This positions you as a brand that cares about your audience and values customer service.

Paid Social Media serves many different purposes. It can be used to build brand awareness like organic social, but more commonly, it is leveraged to build consideration, generate leads, and drive conversions of your product or service. When considering spending money on social media ads, you again need to consider a few questions:

1. Who is your target audience? Before you decide what platform you want to serve ads on, you need to clearly define who your audience is. You should outline demographics (age, gender, location), common interests, job titles, and more. The clearer the understanding you have about who you want to target, the more successful your campaign will be. 
2. What do you want your audience to do, and how will you define the success of your campaign? Do you want to drive purchases of your products, or do you want to generate interest in your service? Knowing that answer will help you decide what type of campaign you should run. Link this back to your business goals, but also consider the investment required for your product or service. A greater investment may mean you need to build consideration and nurture leads before they convert to a customer.
3. What is your brand voice, and style? Sound familiar? As we spoke about in the organic social section, brand recognition depends on defining your brand’s voice and style. Your ads tone of voice and creatives should match the style of what you’ve built on organic social, as well as on your website and other marketing collateral. This way, the user may have that “aha” moment if they realize they’ve seen or heard of your brand before.

Now that we know the basics of organic and paid social media, let’s chat about how they can work together to meet your business goals.

1. Targeting: We’ve already talked about defining your audiences and choosing platforms based on where they’re the most active. We can also use our organic social audiences to build similar audiences on paid social through lookalikes of our organic followers, or lookalikes of past customers. It’s also important to leverage retargeting audiences built of people who already follow you, or have visited your profile or website. Since these people already know who you are, the CPC is typically low.
2. Boosting: If you have a superstar organic social post, you should consider boosting it with ad spend to reach more people. You know it resonated well with your organic audience, so putting money behind it to reach new audiences offers an opportunity to build your following, send users to your website, and even capture new conversions.
3. Reporting: You should consistently report on both organic and paid social campaigns and outline key takeaways from the performance metrics you are seeing. Doing so helps you make informed decisions on what to change in your paid and organic social strategies. If your strategies are truly unified, your findings on paid social should influence how you share organic social content with your audience as well.

Ready to get started on building your brands organic and paid social strategies? TribalVision’s team of dedicated social experts can help you reach your goals in 2023! Get in touch with us today.