Finding balance between paid and organic social

Before deciding how to utilize paid and organic social content, you have to know the difference and benefits of both forms of social posting.

Organic social content involves manually going into a specific platform or using a tool such as Hootsuite to schedule and release social content to your own social pages.

Paid content is social media content with paid media dollars behind it. Paid content appears on target audiences’ social and web pages. Examples of paid content are sponsored or promoted ads, which can be positioned across multiple social platforms.

Now that we’ve defined they key differences in paid and organic social, it’s important to realize many brands struggle with knowing when to use one over the other and which benefits can be garnered from these two forms of social posts.

A brand that has faced this same struggle and figured out a way to leverage both paid and organic social is Benefit Cosmetics.

Benefit discovered using paid media is most beneficial to them in the months before a new product launch or holiday package. The reason for this is their main KPI for paid media content is brand awareness. They use organic media to engage with and acquire new customers. By using organic content to capture date and show what kind of language and posts resonate naturally with their core audience, Benefit is able to then use that data behind a larger media campaign. This allows them to perfect their messaging and creative to reach new audiences.

Rather than focusing on which platform is “most important,” and they like to focus on what each platform can be best utilized for, to not only be able to create but publish the best content for the audiences on each specific channel. For example, they use Snapchat and Instagram stories for makeup tutorials, takeovers, and etc.

The big takeaway from Benefit and many other brands is that paid and organic content should work in parallel and compliment one another. Paid content reaches the audiences and makes them aware of your brand or product, and organic content keeps them engaged and involved with your brand or products.

To read more on how these two forms of social posts work, click here.