Organic vs. Paid Social Media Strategy

Akansha Pandey
BrandBurp
Published in
4 min readFeb 4, 2021

Organic social media strategy helps in developing and building a brand. It uses tools to create an online network in order to create a brand presence. Organic social media strategy is totally based on organic ways of engaging the audience through unpaid promotion.

Organic vs. Paid Social Media

Organic strategy is very important for your brand as it provides what paid promotions cannot. If executed in the correct way, it can get your brand recognition without paying a single penny. It is an excellent tool for promoting your business and engaging with customers on a ground level. Most importantly it communicates your brand’s morals and values.

Here’s how you can use social media strategy to thrive organically:

- Use trending hashtags

- Post unique content

- Be creative

- Create content on the basis of the social media platform you are using

- Remove unwanted comments

- Post regularly

- Schedule your posts

- Reply to people’s queries

- Engage audience through polls and Q&A

-Use tools like Hootsuite to manage your posts

Understanding the role of Paid social media strategy

A paid social media strategy uses advertisement tools on the basis of the social media platform you are using. It helps in creating, scheduling, and posting content to your target audience. Paid social media strategy is important as it lets you build a network on a much larger platform. It helps in reaching your content, posts, and videos to your target audience in any demographic area. The strategies vary depending on the social medial media channel. Planning a paid social media campaign or ad can be tricky as it requires a strategy. Planning it correctly can help you get the maximum benefit in a budget.

Here’s how you can plan it:

- Decide a budget

- Define your target audience

- Finalize your content

- Define your goals and objectives

- Select a social media platform

- Choose the start and end date of running the ad

- Create the ad set

- Launch the ad/campaign

- Measure your results

Organic vs. paid social media strategy “The Key Differences”

Now that we know what organic and paid social media strategy is, let’s decide which one to choose? And most importantly which strategy is better? Not to deny but both are equally important for a brand to sustain itself in the market. Paid promotion, though, a very useful technique to reach the target audience on a wide scale doesn’t usually help in building an image of the brand during the initial stages. Organic strategy, on the other hand, helps in communicating your brand to the audience.

Talking about the monetary value, paid strategy requires a lot of money while organic strategies are completely unpaid. Strategies like using trending hashtags and collaborating with influencers can drive huge traffic.

Hence, organic social media strategy shouldn’t be ignored or excluded when planning a business. However, it doesn’t help in increasing the reach on a very large scale. That’s when paid strategies are used to engage with the niche audience. Every social media platform uses a pay-per-click (PPC) model for payment, which is not just cost-effective but also an excellent way of promoting business.

PPC payment model is a marketing model in which advertisers pay only when their ads are clicked.

Recommended Read: Organic VS Paid Facebook Advertisement — What to Choose?

How to incorporate an organic and paid social media strategy?

With social media users growing with every passing day, the chances of increasing the reach through organic posts are very less. In spite of that, the social media presence it makes is unmatched. Therefore, using organic and paid social media strategies not only build a reputation and improve online presence but also increase the reach of the brand. The target audience gets more aware of the various aspect of the brand. It also helps in building a community wherein people are able to get more insights and make a better connection.

Organic and paid social media strategies are both social media marketing strategies and they have their own advantages and disadvantages. Hence, incorporating them together brings out the best. Here’s how you can integrate an organic and paid social media strategy:

- Automate your posts: There are tools like Hootsuite and Buffer that can ease your work by automating your posts. Not only do they create your posts, but schedule and post them too.

- Know the purpose of each channel: Each social media channel is different and the purpose of using them is different. Hence, before making a post, especially a paid one, ensure that you know why you are using that platform.

- Make posts that complement each other on various platforms: Your posts might be distinct but do not forget that they are being shared for the same brand. Hence, a balance is important across all channels.

- Do not make all promotional posts paid: Paid promotions undoubtedly bring a higher reach but making every post paid isn’t the best idea as it can set a wrong image of your brand.

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Akansha Pandey
BrandBurp

She loves to write about what she has learned in all these years in the industry. She thinks that knowledge should be shared with everyone.