Once upon a time, social media marketers had a choice between the slow but sustainable growth of organic strategies and the quickfire results of paid.
Today, that choice no longer exists (at least not for most brands and industries). Social has increasingly become a pay-to-play environment, with platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X/Twitter slashing organic reach and filling our feeds with ads.
So if you’re going to hit your marketing goals, you need to effectively combine your organic and paid social efforts. Read on to learn about:
- The specific benefits of paid and organic social
- The limitations of each
- How to integrate organic and paid to boost reach and engagement
Let’s get into it…
Organic vs Paid Social: What’s the Difference?
Before we compare organic and paid social, let’s start with some definitions:
What Is Organic Social?
Organic social media is any sort of social activity that doesn’t involve any ad budget, such as standard posts, stories, and Reels.
What Is Paid Social?
Paid social media — also known as social advertising — is any activity involving paid promotion, from one-off promoted posts to full-fledged campaigns with multiple audiences and creatives.
There are various payment models for social ads, but the most common is pay-per-click, where you pay every time someone clicks your ad.
Costs vary between different platforms and industries. For instance, at time of writing, the average cost per click (CPC) on Facebook stood at $1.72 — although some industries are significantly more expensive:
Benefits of Organic Social
While there are thousands of articles online about the so-called “death of organic social,” there’s no doubt that organic still has a key role to play in your marketing strategy. Here’s where it excels:
Reach Your Audience for Free
The most obvious benefit of organic social is that it’s totally free. The only “investment” it requires is the time and effort taken to write a post and create any accompanying visual assets. Plus you have the potential to go viral, which doesn’t happen with paid strategies.
Tap Into Sustainable Growth
Because it’s free, organic social growth is totally sustainable. Once an organic post exists, it’ll stick around forever (unless you delete it). So there’s a chance it’ll keep generating reach and engagement weeks or months after you first shared it. Again, this isn’t possible with paid social, which stops generating impressions the second you turn off your ad budget.
Build a Community
Perhaps the biggest strength of organic social is the ability to build an online community around your brand. You can encourage your followers to share their own thoughts and join in with existing conversations, which makes you feel less like a faceless brand and more like a trusted source of information.
👉 Learn more: Discover the benefits of building a brand community (and how to do it) in our article: How “MeeMaw” Helped VDOT Northern Virginia Create a Highly-Engaged Social Media Community.
Benefits of Paid Social
Where organic struggles, paid social shines. Let’s look at the specific benefits of social media advertising:
Enjoy Instant Results
It can take new brands months (or even years) to see meaningful results from organic social. But with paid strategies, you can start generating impressions, engagements, clicks, and sales from the second you launch your first ad. Plus social media analytics tools make it easy to track the ROI of your ad campaigns.
Reach New Audiences
Unless an organic post goes viral, you’ll be mostly talking to (a small proportion of) your followers. Whereas paid social allows you to reach beyond your existing audience, which is crucial to bringing in new customers.
Target Exactly the Right People
Arguably the single biggest benefit of paid social is that you can choose exactly who you want to reach. For instance, Facebook’s detailed targeting options let you target based on:
- Demographics like education level and financial status
- Interests like hobbies, activities, and the types of pages they follow
- Behaviors like the mobile device they use and the digital activities they enjoy
So you don’t have to worry about wasting ad budget on people who are a terrible fit for your product or service.
👉 Learn more: Get inspired with our article: 16 Stellar Examples of High-Converting Facebook Ads.
Limitations of Organic & Paid Social: Why To Consider a Hybrid Strategy
Organic and paid both have major benefits, but they also have significant downsides.
While organic is free, it requires a lot of manual labor to constantly come up with new content ideas, test your messaging to understand what resonates with your audience, and respond to comments from followers.
On the flip side, paid social can be expensive — especially if you’re in an industry with high CPCs, like finance, customer service, or home improvement. And while it’s great for driving immediate action, it’s far less effective at building relationships with your audience.
All of which means that if you aren’t combining organic and paid, you’re likely not enjoying the full benefits of social media marketing.
5 Tips for Combining Organic & Paid Social
By this point, it should be clear that a hybrid organic and paid strategy is the best option for most brands. Now, let’s discuss how to make it happen:
Start By Boosting Top-Performing Organic Posts
Given the wealth of targeting options and campaign types, paid social is far more intricate than organic.
If you’re taking your first steps in the world of paid ads, the easiest way to get started is to “boost” an organic post. This simply means paying to promote one of your existing posts so it reaches a wider audience.
Choose a post that’s already attracting a bunch of likes, comments, shares, and clicks. That way, you can feel pretty confident it’ll resonate with the right people, because your current followers like it.
The process of boosting an organic post varies between platforms, but it’s always pretty easy (after all, every social network wants your ad bucks). For instance, on Facebook, you just have to click the Boost button next to the relevant post:
Choose When To Pay
To be clear, running a hybrid strategy doesn’t mean prioritizing paid every time you have something worth promoting.
For instance, if you’re launching a new product, you definitely want your existing customers to know about it. So it makes sense to share the news with an organic post or two, just like menswear brand Chubbies does in this example:
View this post on Instagram
Provided you have a large enough following, you may not need to spend any money on ads to support the launch — organic will do all the work for you.
However, if you’ve got something bigger to promote, paid might be the better option.
Sticking with Chubbies, they decided to invest some ad budget in their 2024 Pride campaign:
Which makes sense: this is exactly the sort of promotion that you’d want to share with the widest possible audience because it taps into a broader conversation and celebrates the brand’s ethical credentials.
Bridge the Gap With Influencer Marketing
Many marketers find there’s a stark divide between their organic and paid social activity.
Their organic posts are all about building the brand and nurturing relationships with followers, while paid is all sell, sell, sell.
That’s a problem. If someone starts following you after they’ve seen one of your ads, you want them to immediately recognize your tone of voice — not feel like they’re looking at a totally different brand.
Perhaps the most effective way to close this gap is through influencer marketing, which combines many of the best elements of both strategies.
To demonstrate our point, check out this collaboration between Adobe Design and freelance illustrator Giulia Hartz:
View this post on Instagram
It still feels like a regular organic post. And, just like a paid ad, it also allows Adobe Design to reach a wider audience of people who might be interested in their product.
👉 Learn more: Kick-start your influencer strategy with our guide: How to Find The Best Influencer For Your Brand.
Use Organic Followers in Paid Targeting
Presumably, your social followers dig your brand. Some of them have bought from you — perhaps multiple times. And they’re interested in what you have to say.
Wouldn’t it be good if you could reach a bunch of people who were exactly like them? With social ads, you can, thanks to a feature called “lookalike audiences.”
This allows you to target social media users with similar characteristics and behaviors to your existing followers, but with one key difference: they haven’t engaged with your brand yet.
It’s a highly effective way to help you spend your ad budget in the right places.
Trial New Messaging Via Organic
Paid social offers a ton of A/B testing options.
But there’s a problem: if you’re not sure whether your new ad messaging will resonate with your audience, you’ll have to pay for the privilege of finding out. If it flops, you’ve spent a bunch of money with nothing to show for it.
That’s why we recommend testing new themes, angles, or creative styles in organic posts before adding them to paid campaigns. If they perform at least as well as your regular organic content, you can feel pretty confident they’ll work well in a paid campaign too.
Want to learn how top marketers get more social media reach and engagement? Sign up for one of our upcoming social media conferences.
Featured image by Freepik.
