Why Paid Social Media Outweighs Organic Social Media

As a combination of earned, owned, and paid marketing channels, social media provides countless opportunities for engagement with millions of people every day. While nearly every business in America uses social media for marketing, many businesses are severely lacking when it comes to leveraging paid social media to optimize awareness, traffic, and conversions. Why is paid social media so important-and is your business taking advantage of it?

Why Paid Social Media Matters

Social media can reach millions of potential customers, but it takes more than a page and content to manufacture traffic. In other words, even the best organic content won’t garner a fraction of the results you’d see through paid advertising. Just like paid search marketing, paid social media is a way to optimize your results. 

Paid social media allows you to hyper-target the audiences you want to reach. You can choose demographics, behaviors, activities, locations, and more-as criteria for who sees your ads and content. Why does that matter?

Because businesses are typically handicapped by most social media platforms, even folks who follow or like your page won’t see your regular posts as often as you’d like. That means your regular organic posts may not show up in the feeds of even your most loyal customers. Comparatively, running paid ads can optimize your audience for the most potential conversions. 

Not only does your payment ensure that your posts are seen by the people you want-they see them more often. That will get your foot in the door, so to speak, but it’s up to you to deliver a compelling value proposition and call-to-action. 

Figure Out Your Objective(s) and Plan Accordingly

Figuring out your objective is essentially just determining your strategy. Whether you want to create more first-time customers or improve your overall brand loyalty, social media can help. The right strategy can help improve customer perceptions of your brand and inspire additional purchases-but only if the right people see it. That’s where paid social media advertising really proves its worth.

For instance, setting aside even a $50 budget per month to either boost your posts or run a paid campaign can increase your reach and impressions by 1000% or more. Best of all, whether your objective is to get more clicks, conversions, or overall impressions, you’ll be able to review the KPIs and make adjustments as necessary to achieve those goals. 

Organic content has its merits-and paid social media advertising is, by all accords, still organic content-as long as its original. If you’re going to take the time to create high-quality content, make sure the right people see it. 

Paid Social Media Should Supplement Regular Posting

Even though paid social media advertising is generally more effective at generating new customers, you can’t neglect regular posting. If someone clicks on a paid ad and notices your business hasn’t posted anything in months, they’ll be less likely to investigate further. At the same time, all your content should be on-brand. Paid content that significantly differs from your usual content may confuse your customers. 

So how often should you advertise on social media? You shouldn’t saturate potential customers’ feeds with pleas for business. Make sure your content adds value to the people who see it-and that they can see it to begin with!

Make Paid Social Media A Part of Your Strategy!

Most importantly, paid social media advertising can be a one-time thing or a regular thing. You don’t need to commit to a significant sum or pay to publish every post. Paid social media merely represents another option to invest in your business. 

Whether you choose to advertise on one platform or a combination of platforms, paid social media advertising can help. Consider supplementing your regular posting with paid campaigns or boosted posts. It’ll help you get the results you want and make your overall social media strategy more effective!