Social media content is essential to any business looking to build their brand. But which approach is best? Social media content can be approached in two ways: paid or organic. We’ve come up with a list of pros and cons for both and our opinion of which approach is best. Read on to find out more!
Organic Social Media
Organic Social Media means free content that all users share on social media, from individuals to international businesses. As a business, when you post to your social media account the people who will see that include your followers, their followers and people following any hashtags you use.
Pros and Cons of Organic Social Media
There are several advantages to organic social media that elevate it above paid:
- It’s free. A fairly simple but obvious one. Organic social media costs nothing but time and can be a great approach for businesses with a limited social media budget
- It let’s you build your relationship with customers. By engaging directly with their customers, a business can build a rapport with them and earn their loyalty. This can go a long way to improving brand appearance and even gaining more customers through word of mouth
- Organic builds your brand reputation. Organic content focuses less on sales and more on engagement. This helps to build your brand reputation over time as trustworthy and approachable
However, there are some downsides to organic social media:
- Time consuming. Organic social media can take a lot of time as you build your brand reputation and trying to engage with every customer on a social media platform can be a difficult task
- It isn’t targeted. This means the people you want to see your content the most, may not see it at all. This means you have to take a more generalised approach to try and please all the demographics that may be among your followers, speaking of…
- It limits your audience. Since organic content only targets your existing followers, it means fewer people are seeing what you’re posting. This reduces the chances of finding new customers
Pros and Cons of Paid Social Media
Just as there are advantages to organic social media, there are also reason why you would want to pick paid social media instead:
- Expands your audience reach. Paid social media allows you to reach target audiences who may not have otherwise heard of you through organic means
- Can be customised for target audiences. With paid social media, you can actually target certain demographics based on their digital footprint. This allows you to create specialised content for specific demographics, increasing the likelihood of converting them to a customer
- It can increase brand awareness. By paying to have your brand top of the SERPs you can ensure your brand is fresh in the mind of potential customers.
But of course, there are disadvantages to using paid social media:
- It’s not free. Another obvious one but it goes without saying that paid social media costs and doesn’t necessarily see a return on that investment
- Competition is high. You won’t be the only one running paid campaigns and will have to compete with other businesses trying to get their brand to the top. This can make the aforementioned costs higher if you want to have your ads prioritised over others
- It can become repetitive. Spam is not something people are generally fond of, and paid ads can become repetitive very quick when they are flooding the social media feeds. This can have a negative affect on your brand image and adversely affect your paid efforts.
So which is best?
Why not both? For a business to truly succeed and thrive, it should ideally take both approaches. Both forms of social media have strengths the other does not and these strengths can even help to make up for the others shortcomings. While paid social media is great for building brand awareness and attracting new customers, organic social media can build brand recognition and help to build a rapport with those customers. So, our personal opinion when it comes to organic vs paid social media? Both, both is good.
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