Don’t have time for the full article, here’s a quick summary.

  • Using both paid and organic as a hybrid approach to social delivers huge gains across every platform
  • Use organic for social SEO, relationship building, service and thought leadership
  • Use paid to develop social opportunities and reach a greater amount of people for immediate gains.

Read on for the full story…

 

 

Social media marketing has evolved so much, just over the last 12 months. In order to keep up with consumer expectations, it’s important to develop what we call a hybrid strategy. It’s no longer a question of paid vs. organic, the marketing approach that genuinely pays off combines both in a way that makes each one stronger than if they were run independently.

Organic social means any social media activity that is not a paid promotion. It uses the free channel tools to build and engage with your followers. Paid social refers to any activity on your channels that you put money behind, e.g. boosted posts, advertising campaigns, anything you pay a channel like Facebook or LinkedIn, for an activity that is performed.

Organic and paid social strategies are most successful when they work in tandem to simultaneously nurture and engage your followers, while reaching out and expanding the awareness of you brand to a broader outside audience.

As standalone organic reach continues to plummet across all platforms, it is becoming increasingly important to invest in paid advertising to develop social opportunities and reach a greater amount of people, who may not have come across you in their feed organically. Feeds are prioritised and businesses are generally last on the list, behind friends, family, groups, etc.

While organic reach is in decline, the benefits that it delivers is critical to so many aspects of your digital ecosystem, from social SEO and extending your network through social sharing, to customer service and brand reputation management. As long as you focus on adding value as opposed to a constant bombardment of sales pitches in every post, your followers will keep coming back to see what is happening and what you have to say.

One of the best ways to utilise your organic social media is to make it your testing ground to discover what is most important to your audience before putting any money behind paid campaigns. Don’t waste your money on using paid campaigns to test what gets attention and what doesn’t, experiment with your organic posts and use the most popular to craft your paid campaign topics.

As always, it is so important to keep track of your analytics, across both paid and organic, to help determine the best days and times to post, who your audience is, what resonates and what doesn’t with your audience. We make this easy at SIVACOM with our exclusive Sivalytics reporting app, giving our clients access to their analytics 24/7, so they can see all of their data in real time across everything from social media to their website stats and everything in between.

Social media is making it easier than ever for brands to compete for audience and by developing a hybrid social media strategy, you can focus on adding value through organic, while using paid to spread the offer to your ideal audience for conversions.

If you’re looking to develop a Hybrid Social Media Strategy to take advantage of the rebounding economy, connect with our team today, we’d love to help you succeed online.