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Social media: organic versus paid reach

Is organic versus paid reach more effective to grow and convert your online audience? We review the benefits and pitfalls of each.

It’s the age old question with social media marketing: is organic versus paid reach more effective to grow and convert your online audience? To determine which of these two marketing techniques is a smarter alternative for achieving your social media marketing goals, we’ve researched the benefits and pitfalls.

Organic reach

The major benefit of growing your social media audience through organic reach is it costs you “nothing”. However, it’s important to understand that while you don’t outlay financially for organic reach, you need to invest time, which correlates to money if you consider how your time could be spent doing other profit-making activities.

With organic reach, you can grow a large and devoted social media audience if you have a strategic campaign that’s industry and audience relevant. Still, it will take time and careful analysis of your social media strategy.

A pitfall of organic reach is you can’t segmentalise your audience to the extent that paid reach allows.

Paid reach

With paid reach, the foremost benefit is your ability to segmentalise your social media audience when targeting your social media campaign to ensure the highest rate of growth and conversion.

Another great benefit of paid campaigns is being able to reach two audiences with the same campaign, as Facebook allows joint campaigns with Instagram for the same targeting cost.

While organic campaigns only allow your posts to stay live for a short period of time, with paid campaigns, you can schedule your posts for whenever you believe is the optimal time to connect with your audience. You can also tailor your paid campaigns through analytics, to ensure the best audience reach and conversion.

But the limitation of paid campaigns is the cost you have to outlay, which doesn’t always correlate to a high return on investment if you have the wrong strategy.

While both social media marketing techniques have benefits and pitfalls, by combining the two you’ll have a higher rate of success with social media marketing. Follow our blog for more great tips on social media marketing. If you need assistance with social media, contact the iFactory team today.

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