Paid advertising is big business and is a great way to help spread awareness about your brand. As social media sites have become inundated with business accounts and complicated with algorithms, it can seem as if paid posts are the only way to be seen. While they are great for spreading the word, organic social media engagement should be used concurrently with paid campaigns to maximize your reach. Organic engagement utilizes the free features of social media to reach your audience. This can include posting a status, using a hashtag, or replying to someone on Twitter. Using the full range of organic engagement techniques brings along major benefits.

Organic social media engagement can be instrumental in boosting your brand’s credibility. If a user sees your ad and heads over to your Facebook page, you want to have a robust feed of posts that prove that your business is legitimate. A bare page with no engagement may signal to potential customers that your brand is not yet established or even is a scam.

In addition, as customers read through your feed or see your conversations with other users, these are great opportunities to further communicate your brand values. You likely already have a great logo and website that show your customers who you are, and your social media pages are another great place to do this. They are also a great place to show the fun and creative side of your company. Using flashy imagery or unique video content is a great way to catch potential customers’ eyes and help them  remember you.

Paid ads are great for getting new people to your social media pages, but once they click follow, organic social media engagement is the best way to keep in touch. To do this effectively, don’t solely fill your page with posts that promote your brand or product, followers will tire of seeing these types of posts and will likely unfollow you. Instead, curate a feed that is primarily relevant content your followers will be interested in seeing such as news articles or cool images. Then sparingly work in the posts about your brand.

Creating an organic feed in this way may take you slightly more time, but it is also cost effective for the long-term. Paid ads can quickly become expensive and, depending on your budget, may not be sustainable. Using a combination of approaches will help your money go further while engaging a larger audience.

Finally, many small businesses, some of whom may be your direct competitors, use a hybrid approach between paid and organic social media engagement. In order to keep up, it is a good idea to use this approach, or you may find yourself wondering why other companies always seem to have just a little bit more traffic or slightly more customer engagement on their social media pages.

We can’t lie, paid social media advertising is important in helping your brand gain traffic, but combining this with organic social media engagement is a great way to stretch your budget, increase your reach, and interact with the followers you have already gained. Do you have questions about organic engagement? Ask us on Twitter, @KuvioCreative.