Here's a frightening statistic: Only about 4% of your Facebook followers are seeing your brand's organic posts..
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While social media may have offered free and potentially limitless access to your audience just a few years ago, today's social marketing is little more than a pay-to-play environment.
When we get down to brass tacks, I think we can all agree that paid social is both effective and essential for brands using social media marketing. However, organic social still has a critical role to play. But before we get into the ways organic social media can benefit your brand, you should know that when it comes to platform, one size does not fit all.
An example I often see is when clients routinely post identical content to their social mainstays, expecting this approach to be effective, but never really using a strategy that accounts for the specifics of each social platform. After all, every platform serves a unique purpose and has distinct demographics, meaning the content being shared on places like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram should be tailored to each platform.
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Now having laid a foundation for a basic social media approach, let's take a more advanced look at the value of using organic social media to your brand's advantage..
Communicating Brand Values
Perhaps the most important role that organic social plays is communicating your brand's lifestyle and values to consumers and potential consumers. This can be accomplished in different ways, depending on the platform.
For example, Instagram is the perfect setting for using lifestyle photography to visually communicate your brand aesthetic. Pinterest, on the other hand, is the place where tips, tricks, recipes and how-to content plays straight to the platform's audience. Using Twitter for brand engagement? Here you can be specific with language and utilize any influencers you've built relationships with. In the end, it comes down to using each platform's strengths to define and differentiate your brand.
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Brand Validation
These days, it's common for consumers to check out a brand's social channels before becoming a customer. Usually they're hoping to get a better sense of your brand's values and to verify that you really are who you say you are. This consumer behavior gives you a strong incentive to consistently share internal company news, media placements and articles where someone from your brand is being quoted. In doing so, you're not only solidifying your brand presence, you're also reinforcing the positive things others have said about you.
Attracting Talent
Consumers aren't the only ones using social media to check up on you. Job seekers also use it as a tool to vet potential employers on the hunt for new positions. So, at a time when social media plays such a big role in landing new talent, you should ask yourself: Are your social media accounts working for you or against you? A sparse or non-existent social presence can be a real turnoff to job seekers who may wonder what you have to hide, or why you aren't investing in maintaining your digital presence. If you want to attract top talent, using social media to showcase what's great about your company is a wise choice.
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If you're going to have social media profiles, you can expect these profiles to receive equal doses of complaints and admiration from your followers. And whether the comments are damning or adoring, you can't allow them to go unanswered, making community management a critical component of running organic social media successfully. By demonstrating that you care about your community and that you're present and engaged in the conversations they're having, you will improve your ability to communicate positive brand values. Moreover, you'll also appear trustworthy to users who turn to social media to validate you.
Creative Outlet
Social media is the perfect place to showcase your brand's creative side, especially if there isn't a place on your website to put creative content, or it';s just not the appropriate outlet for it. Social media lets you show off your creativity without bogging down your website or exhausting design and development resources. As a bonus, the campaign-centric creativity that can live on social platforms has built-in, natural shareability. If you're looking to elevate your brand, combining a smart campaign with the right creative assets can do wonders.
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Influencer Relationships
For brands, there's no better place than social media to find and nurture influencer relationships. If you're on the PR team or the influencer marketing team, social media is often the go-to resource for connecting with influencers. Unlike cold-calling or emailing, a simple like, follow or casual engagement with social media influencers is a far better way of making a first-time introduction.
Then once these relationships are established, you can tap creative influencers to help create content on your behalf and, ultimately, share that content with their massive networks. Just ask watch brand Daniel Wellington, which works directly with influencers by sending them watches to photograph in a variety of settings. These influencers are now the de facto creative arm of the brand, using their influencer-generated content to boost the brand's creative capabilities. These influencers, all working within their specific niches, helped expand DW's reach just a short time after the brand's launch - and it's still going strong.
While it's true to say that paid media is an indispensable component of any successful social media strategy, organic social media is just as important today as it has been in the past. Despite organic reach having shrunk to single-digit proportions, your organic social presence is still a powerful ally when it's being harnessed and supported.
Guest Authored By John Marcinuk. John is Group Director of Marketing Production, overseeing owned and earned media, at NYC digital agency Blue Fountain Media. Follow John on Twitter.
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Authored by:Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends. My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
