Organic Social Marketing or Paid Social Advertising?
Which is the more effective traffic generation and customer acquisition channel between the two? Where should a social media marketer invest their resources (time, efforts and even dollars)?
In the social ecosystem, there has been a roaring debate going on for a long time over the use of Paid Advertising vs. Organic Marketing, and which one provides better value for a brands social marketing strategies.
So, lets dive in to compare the two contenders and find which one wins the Game of Thrones:
To play and win the game, you must know the rules of the game. So, lets understand how social algorithms work to get maximum organic social traffic to your website.
Easy to say, difficult to do!
Understanding the working mechanism of social algorithms is not a piece of cake. The algorithm for each social platform works differently. For instance, on Facebook, a core factor that affects the rankings of a post is: relevancy score, whereas on YouTube the total watch time of the video per session decides whether a video becomes a suggested video or not.
To add to the woes of social marketers, engineers update these social algorithms from time-to-time; making it next to impossible for social marketers to keep track of each and every social platforms algorithms on a regular basis.
However, after thoroughly analyzing a few social algorithms, social media experts have found that just like Googles algorithm, social algorithms are also basically designed to give users the best experience possible. In short, the goal behind any social algorithm is pretty simple To promote the best content to the most relevant people.
So, the key to amplify your website traffic with organic social marketing is to post only quality content (which falls in any of these 3 categories informative, inspiring or entertaining) that is relevant to your target audience.
Webcast, March 15th: How to Scale Upmarket with Enterprise Field Sales
Now that we know how to crack the social algorithms, lets see instances where it is beneficial to go for organic social marketing to generate traffic for your business website:
A large number of social media marketers believe that paid social ads delivers results. But simply investing dollars in paid social ads will do you no good. Your ad should be click-worthy!
The results of paid social ads depend on how enticing the ads are you have crafted. Ensure they have the right call-to-action buttons with a link to your website or landing page.
Here is the list of instances where a social media marketer must opt for paid social ads over organic social marketing:
Here is a list of factors which will help you to decide which social strategy you must opt for under a given circumstance:
Apart from the above mentioned factors, analyzing your competitors social strategy, the industry your business falls into, and individual social platforms will also help you in deciding the right social strategy. For instance, recently the Facebook algorithm reduced the exposure of organic content, so for exponential results on Facebook a brand must go for paid ads.
There is no one size fits all formula when it comes to social media marketing. For instance, a fast food chain restaurant could find a large number of people ordering food on their website with a simple organic Facebook post, and on the other hand a small mobile app development company may see dramatic results with a promoted tweet.
What may work for one, may not work for another.
From analyzing my own personal Tweets, I came to the conclusion that people are more likely to like or share content rather than click on it:
Therefore to earn large number of visitors from social platforms, you need to regularly post contagious content that will compel social users to visit your website.
Find the kind of posts your followers and target audience finds interesting by analyzing all social channels, campaigns and posts, and figure out what works best for your brand in a given scenario.
It is clear from this article that there is no single winner when it comes to selecting between paid social ads and organic social marketing.
Paid ads can help get the ball rolling and gain the initial needed exposure for your start-up, but to continue gaining traffic you definitely need to have concrete plans for organic social marketing. It is therefore advisable for you to use both the strategies in tandem to have a significant growth in web traffic.
As you layout your social marketing plan for 2017, dont forget to keep the above points in mind and select the right social strategy under a given situation to boost web traffic.
Which form of social media marketing is generating traffic for your company? Share with us your thoughts and experience of using social platforms by commenting below.
Read more here:
Organic Marketing Vs Paid Advertising: Who Wins The Traffic Game On Social? - Business 2 Community