Your Digital Marketing Expert

Paid social media advertising promises quick results. A campaign can be launched on any number of social media networks within minutes. Before long, the metrics are there for you to see. If the campaign isn’t hitting the right numbers, cut it before it burns the budget. If it’s performing well, scale it up and let the highly tuned algorithms work their magic.

Is that enough, though? Most marketers wouldn’t agree. In this day and age, brands need to maintain an online presence that relies on a hybrid of organic and paid social media strategy. Content will always be king online but the way it’s presented to the audience is quite important in achieving the desired objectives.

However, it seems like the vast majority of brands would much rather focus on a paid social media strategy exclusively. Only a few would opt for the organic option and even fewer will be able to do it right. There’s no denying the fact that gaining organic social research has become difficult.

Social media networks want to extract more money out of marketers and are thus making changes to their platforms that effectively deprioritize content that doesn’t have advertising dollars behind it.

Despite the proclamations of many that organic social content is dead on arrival, it’s far from a lost cause, and the brands that are able to do it well are still able to extract considerable engagement from it.

What is organic social content?

Organic social content can simply be described as any post on a social media network, whether text or media, that’s not boosted to the audience through a paid promotion. The content is posted to the brand’s page or profile without any advertising push.

It can be anything from a video posted on the brand’s official YouTube channel, a TikTok, a Story on Instagram, a Tweet or a post on your brand’s Facebook page.

Once it’s posted, you can expect a fraction of your followers to see it. For example, if your Facebook page has one million followers, it doesn’t mean that anything you post on your page will be shown to a million followers.

This is what’s called the organic reach. Estimates suggest that the average organic reach for a Facebook Page post is 5.20%. Going by the aforementioned example, on average only 5.20% of the million followers would see that post.

If your followers like what they see, they’ll probably share it on their own feeds. This will enable their followers to see content from your brand’s social media presence even if they’re not following it. Lastly, if you use hashtags in your posts, the people who follow those hashtags may also see your posts.

How organic social content resonates with your audience

Authenticity goes a long way online. People value brands that appear genuine and approachable online. By posting organic social content, brands can build trust with their audience and that in turn helps drive conversions down the line.

There’s also an element of community building to it. Brands that leverage this strategy successfully are able to build loyal tribes online that not only consistently buy their products but also advocate for them.

Organic social content plays a major role in convincing people who may have just discovered your online presence to stick around. If a visitor lands on your Facebook page through an ad and sees no other content other than the ads, they wouldn’t want to stick around for so long.

On the contrary if they find an abundance of organic content, whether that be brand insights, customer testimonials, product reviews, etc not only will they stick around for longer but they would likely take more of an interest in your brand.

Extracting engagement from organic social content is an art

It’s true. Extracting the most engagement possible from organic content is more of an art than a science. It requires a lot more diligence than a paid post. The engagement will continue to roll in for a post that has an ad spend behind it. The algorithm will keep pushing it even if the audience is not responding favorably.

Organic social content has the ability to take on a life of its own. Most viral content that you find online doesn’t have a paid campaign behind it. The content just needs to be interesting enough to attract the attention of a lot of people. If they keep sharing it, things just snowball from there and the engagement metrics would be much higher than even the best paid campaigns.

1.    Tap into the moment

A brand can’t manufacture the current moment. Whether it’s a celebrity faux pas, a global event or simply a heartwarming story from any corner of the planet. If it intersects with your brands, it’s organic content gold.

These are perhaps the best opportunities for your organic content to shine. The event already has traction online, simply by becoming part of the conversation you can leverage it to increase engagement for your own brand.

However, it requires a deft touch. Take it too far and your brand might appear to be insensitive or tone deaf. Any negative perception created as a result has the possibility of snowballing as well. As long as you’re mindful of that possibility, such moments will provide an incredible change to gain substantial organic reach.

2.    Celebrate your community in its purest form

Organic content that shows viewers how others benefit from or use a product to enrich their lives has the potential of reaching a lot of people online. It’s the kind of stuff that people want to see and share with their friends, an organic reach gold mine.

By sharing unpolished and unfiltered content, ideally user-generated, the brand projects an air of authenticity and affinity for its community. By celebrating them on official channels, brands can draw in viewers who may not be familiar with them but would be intrigued just enough to learn more about them and their products.

3.    Know the best practices for different platforms

No two social media networks are built alike. What works on Facebook may not work on TikTok. If something drives engagement on Instagram it may not perform well on Snapchat. When creating your organic social content, keep in mind the best practices for the network that it will be posted on.

A one-size-fits-all solution is simply not going to work. For example, long captions on your Instagram posts aren’t likely to see a lot of interest compared to clean, crisp images that users expect on the platform. Written content that has a feel of community and sentimentality will do well on Facebook instead, as the audience there is more receptive to it.

These considerations may appear minor but they can make a world of difference to your organic content strategy.

Paid vs organic social content is not mutually exclusive

This is not a zero sum game. The best social media strategies rely on a mix of both paid and organic social content. Paid social media is a behemoth in its own right and it provides brands with immense power to get the word out and reach new audiences.

Organic social content should be viewed more as a marathon and not a sprint. By consistently putting out content that will resonate with audiences, both existing and new alike, brands can continue to elevate trust and sustain engagement over the long term. When paired with paid campaigns, this makes for a formidable social media strategy.

Facebook sounds like the best place to start with your paid social media campaigns and with good reason. It has almost 3 billion users across the globe, reaching 59% of the entire social networking population across the globe. That massive user base makes Facebook an attractive destination for brands.

More than 10 million active advertisers use Facebook to promote their products and services. A significant chunk of its ad sales are generated through mobile. That’s not surprising when you consider the fact that over 80% of Facebook users across the platform via a mobile device.

The stats are incredible, to say the least. It would not be wrong to suggest that Facebook has fundamentally changed the way businesses promote their products and services on the internet. So it’s unsurprising to see marketers focus the bulk of their efforts on the platform.

There is no shortage of articles and guides that explain how to make the most of Facebook ads. Such is the interest in the subject matter that experts and gurus of dubious provenance claim to provide strategies that will make you a master in no time.

This tends to do more harm than good as it leads to the creation of myths and misconceptions that people who may be new to Facebook ads follow blindly. Ultimately, this can severely limit their ability to get the most out of this powerful advertising platform.

Common Facebook marketing myths you should forget

1. Small businesses can’t afford Facebook ads

Nobody can deny that the cost of advertising on Facebook has gone up considerably even from just a few years ago. A combination of factors has contributed to this. There’s a lot more competition now among advertisers on the social network. Changes to Facebook’s algorithm have also limited the potential reach even of paid ads.

Many would discourage a small business, particularly one in an industry with major players, from spending any money on Facebook ads. It would make sense on the surface. How can a small company compete with a big rival that’s spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook alone?

The fact remains that extracting great value out of Facebook ads has less to do with the overall budget and more to do with how the campaign is set up and just how effective the creative and copy is. It’s also possible to set bid caps to ensure that the campaign isn’t burning money beyond the level you’re comfortable at.

2. Start out with small and very targeted audiences

This is another myth that doesn’t really set up newcomers for success. Facebook provides incredibly detailed targeting for ad campaigns, allowing advertisers to narrow down the target audience significantly. It sounds like a great idea at first. Laser-focus your targeting so the ad reaches the people you think will best respond to it.

It’s actually more risky to narrow down your audience too much. Testing audiences is the way to go. Often you’ll find that campaigns with more broad audiences tend to perform better compared to those with highly targeted ones.

You have to let Facebook’s algorithm do its thing. It’s ability to find people who are the most qualified for your campaign is unmatched. Give the algorithm the freedom it needs to find you the people you’re looking for at the cheapest cost.

3. More followers will result in more engagement

This is a rookie mistake and anyone who approaches Facebook ads with this mindset is simply setting their ad spend on fire. No matter how many millions of followers your Facebook page has, it will never directly result in completely proportionate engagement.

Running a campaign just to increase the number of followers on the page isn’t going to get you anywhere. Sure, you’ll end up with a page that looks like a lot of people want to see what’s posted on it, but you actually have no control over how many followers see what you post.

Facebook has limited organic reach severely, this means even if your page has a lot of followers, it will only show your posts to a fraction of them. Even if you do want to increase the number of followers, it’s much better to split the ad spend between campaigns with focused objectives such as conversions or website visits, for example.

4. Boosting a post has the same result as a campaign

Facebook allows you to boost posts on your pages. This feature is positioned as a quick and easy way to increase the reach of a particular post and possibly gain new followers.

There’s a common misconception that this achieves the same results as a full-fledged ad campaign. This myth couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s little evidence to suggest that boosting a post works in the same way to increase conversions as a planned ad campaign.

Brands get sucked into this since boosting a post seems like the better option to those with little experience with Facebook ads, but its efficacy is limited in the grand scheme of things.

5. Always retarget all website visitors

With the Facebook pixel, you can track the behavior of users on your website and retarget them on Facebook with a campaign. The common wisdom is that you should be retargeting all website visitors but it’s nothing more than a misconception. The truth is that not all people who visit your website should be retargeted on Facebook.

For example, some visitors may only be looking for contact information or searching for open positions. They may not be a customer for your products or services. Retargeting website visitors can be very lucrative but only when it’s done right.

It’s usually better to retarget visitors that have shown high-intent behaviors, such as those who added products to cart but abandoned it, read product reviews, looked at the product catalog, etc.

Facebook is still the best destination to spend your ad dollars

There is no slowing down the juggernaut that is Facebook. It continues to fine tune its ad products and algorithms, thereby providing brands with a great opportunity to leverage its massive user base for new customers.

Brands can lose faith in the platform if they don’t see results quickly and particularly when they have their decisions guided by these common myths. For those who are new to this, it’s always best to test on a small scale first with a limited ad spend.

Learn the ropes, figure out how the different campaign objectives work and how all of the different tools can be used. Once you start disregarding the myths and start making decisions based on your own testing, you may come to feel that there’s nothing better than Facebook ads for online marketing.

YouTube is the most popular online video sharing platform. It has revolutionized the way people consume video on the internet while empowering individuals to launch their vlogging careers with little more than a camera and an internet connection, wherever they may be.

The stats don’t lie. There were over 1.8 billion YouTube users across the globe in 2021. Approximately 30,000 hours of video is uploaded to the platform every hour. Over 60% of marketers say that they would increase their ad spend on YouTube.

That’s not surprising. YouTube provides businesses with an incredible opportunity to tap into a massive audience. They can also tap into YouTube’s vibrant creator community to forge partnerships and collaborations that enable them to get their message out to the right audience.

YouTube is a great social media channel for brands. Most now have their own channel where they can share everything from behind-the-scenes content to marketing videos and product reviews. Views may be easy to come across, but how do brands turn those views into customers?

How to increase conversions on YouTube

1. Capture viewers’ ‘next click’

People have a very short attention span online. They jump quickly from one website to the other, and in the case of YouTube, from one video to the other. As a brand, you want viewers to complete an action once they’re done with the video, and not just move on.

This requires influencing viewers on what their “next click” should be. The video should nudge them to complete a specific task. For example, this could be as simple as asking them to subscribe to your channel. If you want to drive them to a landing page, the video should tell them that they should visit the page for more information, an incentive, etc.

This strategy is tied to the production of your videos. They should be created in such a way that incentivizes viewers to take that next step once the video is done. Guiding them through this journey will bring a noticeable increase in conversions.

2. Using SEO to your advantage

Now this might have you confused. Isn’t SEO more about search engines than YouTube? When you think about it, YouTube is actually one of the biggest search engines after Google. People are literally searching for the content they want to view on the platform.

The idea with YouTube SEO is much the same as conventional SEO. You want your videos to appear at the top positions on the front page. The basics hold true here. Carefully construct the titles of your videos to include the keywords and phrases you want the video to rank for. Go one step further, include it in the description and even in the video’s file name when it’s uploaded to YouTube.

These steps are crucial to improving the ranking of your videos. A video on the front page is likely to get a lot more views than one that doesn’t even appear on page number five. Improving the traffic coming in for your videos is one of the simplest ways to increase YouTube conversions.

3. Design eye-catching thumbnails

A simple search on YouTube brings up a sea of videos that most viewers would just scroll through without a second thought. Usually, it’s either the title or the video’s thumbnail that catches their eye and makes them want to watch it.

Brands can’t go for outright clickbait titles that seem to be so common on the video platform. They have to exercise a level of restraint. However, that doesn’t prevent them from using the thumbnails to their advantage in order to increase the click-through rate.

There should be consistency in the video thumbnails that you use, as it helps with elevating the brand and familiarizing it with viewers. The thumbnails should be eye-catching and instantly recognizable as being related to your brand.

4. Boost engagement through live content

Live content is king on the internet and that holds true for YouTube as well. Brands have an incredible opportunity to increase engagement with their audience by going live on the platform. It provides viewers with an opportunity to interact and have a conversation with the brand in real time.

Viewers tend to appreciate live content because it appears more authentic. This helps the brand build trust, a vital element in getting viewers to convert. It’s up to you whether you want your live content to have a more casual or professional appeal.

For the latter, you could prepare scripts in advance and invest in a professional set. This would result in a much higher quality of video production, further elevating the brand’s position in the eyes of the viewer.

5. Don’t sleep on collaborations

Collabs are the name of the game on YouTube. Working together with other known YouTube personalities is a big trend these days. It allows for instant amplification of your videos since the YouTuber the brand collabs with brings their already established audience to the table.

Brands can work together with influencers on YouTube that are related to their niche in order to push their content to a significantly wider audience. The collabs not only increase the brand’s visibility but also effectively pitch it to the influencer’s audience that’s already quite receptive to their recommendations.

Being featured on a prominent YouTuber’s channel or even getting a shout out from them can result in a bump in conversions, simply by piggybacking on their audience.

YouTube’s eCommerce features are great for conversions, too

If your brand sells products online, it could benefit from YouTube’s ecommerce features. For channels that meet the eligibility requirements, YouTube allows them to have a merch shelf on their channel that’s displayed on each video and also gets a separate Store tab on the channel.

Once it’s set up, the merch shelf can also be promoted by pinning items during a live stream.  Viewers can instantly purchase any of the listed products, and thus it’s a great way of getting them to purchase your swag.

You’re on social media for one reason and that’s to get your message out to as many people as possible. Social media is all about amplification. Those that are able to attract the most amount of eyeballs to their posts, videos, images, etc are considered to be the mavericks of their field.

That’s because social media can be a tough nut to track, particularly for businesses. Maintaining a presence across all of the different networks can be difficult and time consuming. That’s why brands often try to go above and beyond in their efforts to increase their organic reach.

Sometimes, that can end up doing more harm than good. A social media crisis is always best avoided. It has the potential to permanently harm the reputation of a brand and turn customers away forever.

How you might find yourself in a social media crisis

There’s a lot that could go very wrong very quickly on social media. Whether it’s an insensitive image or comment, an ill-timed post that ends up being offensive or the dreaded mix-up between personal and brand accounts by your account manager, a social media crisis can seemingly come out of nowhere.

These things then take on a life of their own. As much as the power of amplification that social media provides can be good for business, the same power can turn out to be a thorn in your side during such times of crisis.

In mere hours, there may be a full blown organic hashtag campaign against your brand just because of a social media faux pas. The viral organic reach that something like this generates will likely dent the reputation of your brand significantly.

Reduce your risk by implementing a social media policy

There’s a simple step that brands can take to greatly limit their risk of a crisis. Never run your brand accounts without a crystal clear social media policy in place first. Otherwise, you and your team will quite literally be flying blind.

A social media policy ensures that the people authorized to post using company accounts know exactly what they’re supposed to say, how they are to interact with followers and what they need to steer clear of.

The policy should also contain guidelines about confidentiality, privacy and copyright. Most importantly, brand voice guidelines will ensure that all account managers know exactly what tone the company wants to keep on social media.

Despite this protection in place if you still find yourself in the midst of a social media crisis, these are the steps to be followed in order to salvage your brand’s reputation.

How brands can recover from a social media crisis

1. Time and speed are of the essence

The best way to recover from a social media crisis is to react quickly. Both time and speed are of the essence when trying to control the damage. If an offending or controversial post has gone online, it should be taken down immediately.

Leaving it up for longer is only going to cause more damage. The longer it stays up the more chances that it will end up being shared far and wide. Now this doesn’t mean just to quietly delete the offending post and pretend that this never happened.

That strategy will do more harm than good. It’s important to acknowledge and make amends. However, it’s always important to remove whatever the social media mistake was made as soon as possible.

2. Honesty is the best policy

Don’t try to dig yourself out of the hole by digging an even bigger one. Trying to shift the blame or making an excuse for what happened is not going to rectify the situation.

Even if the offending post was deleted in mere seconds after it went up, if you have a big enough following, chances are somebody will have seen it, taken a screenshot and shared it before you even had the chance to react.

Never pretend that nothing happened or what did wasn’t all that important. Managing a social media faux pas requires taking ownership of the mistake. Provide an honest explanation to your followers about what happened and what steps have now been taken to ensure something like that doesn’t happen again.

3. Pause all campaigns and review

When there appears to be a potential crisis, it’s always best to pull the plug on any campaigns and schedule posts until you know exactly what happened.

If your social media accounts are operating as if nothing happened that will give off the perception that the brand just doesn’t care or happens to be very insensitive. That will further negatively impact its reputation.

Pausing all campaigns and reviewing the material that’s supposed to go live later limits the risk of the additional content adding fuel to the fire.

4. Engage with followers but don’t argue

Once the initial statement has been put out explaining what happened, chances are that your followers will have questions. They would want to know more about the situation and perhaps learn more about the steps you have taken to prevent such mistakes from being made again.

It’s important to engage with your followers after a social media crisis. This helps regain their trust that may have been lost during the crisis. They will recognize that the brand shows remorse over what happened.

When engaging with followers, try to be as concise as possible. Offer information that they require but don’t get sucked into arguments or appear to justify the offending actions.

5. Conduct an audit of your social media practices

A social media faux pas necessitates an audit of your social media practices. Think of it as a post-mortem of the incident. Work with the relevant teams internally to figure out what went wrong.

Speak to the people who were responsible and also take insight from those who have been dealing with the fallout. After a thorough assessment, make changes to the social media practices to limit the possibility of the incident repeating.

Share the results of the audit and the steps to be taken going forward with your followers. This way they’ll know that the brand is being responsible and taking ownership for its mistakes.

Not all social media crises are fatal if you’re quick to respond

Never think that it’s impossible to come back from a social media faux pas. Unless there has been an unthinkable mistake, the chances of recovering from a crisis like this are actually quite good.

The followers just need to see that the brand has learned from its mistakes and that it’s willing to do a better job preventing such incidents from taking place in the future. Just be quick and decisive when tackling such a controversy.

Most online marketers swear by social listening and if you don’t already have a strategy in place to leverage it, you’re seriously missing out. It will provide you with some of the most valuable data about your business and how it’s being perceived online, enabling you to make more informed decisions regarding your online marketing efforts.

Social listening is a great way to increase interaction with your existing and potential customers online. People tend to appreciate when the businesses they support interact with them online. This lets them know that you care about what they think and believe in providing them with great service.

There’s another aspect to social listening that makes it so powerful. Don’t just leverage it to find out what people are saying about your business. Utilize it to find out what they’re saying about your competition. This will let you identify gaps that you can fill in order to compete more effectively.

What is social listening?

Social listening is the process through which you gain valuable insight by analyzing the mentions and conversations about your brand on social media networks so that you can make more informed marketing decisions.

It shouldn’t just be limited to the conversations that are taking place online about your brand only. Keep an eye on the conversations and trends concerning your particular industry. Also pay attention to what people are saying about your competition online. If they’re doing something better than you are, you’ll likely hear about it online.

Why is social listening important?

There’s a reason why social listening has proven to be so important. The insights that you obtain from this exercise will allow you to understand what’s the driving force behind the conversation about your brand online. Think of it as a window into the mind of your customer, allowing you to figure out what perception people have formed about your brand.

These are valuable insights that can help fine tune your online marketing efforts. For example, are you seeing a lot of mentions online regarding your blog content not adequately explaining the product? This is how you find out that you need to make improvements.

Perhaps the copy of your recent ad campaign has got people feeling not so good about your brand, so now you can quickly make amends and turn a campaign around. The possibilities here are endless.

How social listening can help generate more leads

1. Elevate your engagement

Increasing your social media engagement is just one part of the story. It’s always great when the content you post online gets a lot of likes, comments, shares and retweets. That alone is never enough to generate leads and grow your organic reach.

With social listening, you can be mindful of what your customers and others online are looking for. For example, you could spot a conversation online where people are searching for a product or solution.

You could pop into that conversation either with a recommendation or a relevant comment. It should never be a hard sell as that tends to put off people. Just a proactive approach that lets people know you have a product that can help solve a problem for them will do wonders.

Similarly, you might find that your customers are recommending your brand online to their peers. This presents yet another opportunity to generate leads. Become a part of that conversation through a reply that serves as positive encouragement and you might just get a new customer.

2. Pounce on the competition

Social media is now the first place people turn to when they have a complaint about a brand or its products. This presents companies with an incredible opportunity to generate leads at the expense of their rivals.

Brands must realize that social listening goes far beyond what people are saying about you. Approach it with a view to help people who might benefit from your product. Is your competitor’s product not helping people achieve their goals? Does yours have better functionality?

Chime into conversations where such topics are being discovered with a gentle reminder about your product’s salient features. People who are already frustrated with the competition are more likely to consider an alternative, thereby possibly generating a new lead for your business.

3. Create powerful collaborations

Collaborations tend to be very effective on social media. It’s something that people who use social media are already quite accustomed to. That’s because many of their favorite social media content creators will definitely be “collabing” with other creators.

Social listening can unlock new opportunities to strike collaborations like thought leaders, industry titans and tight knit online communities that have meaningful conversations about something that you might be able to help with.

Online collaborations require a certain level of finesse, though. It shouldn’t appear that this has been done for the sole purpose of making a hard sell or trying to force a product on people who don’t seem to be receptive to it.

Through collaborations, you can add value to the content that the other creators present to their audience. This opens up new demographics and audiences that your brand can benefit from. The increased brand awareness that collaborations will bring is going to help generate new leads.

4. Use social media as a tool for customer support

Nobody wants to go through tedious methods of getting a response when they run into a problem with a product or service. The internet has made people expect instant resolution of such issues, therefore, it’s important to have a robust customer support operation on social media.

Proactive customer support through social media helps build brand equity. People are likely going to notice online when brands are doing a good job with providing their customers support for any issues they might be facing.

The elevated brand equity can be great for generating leads as people will feel confident about trusting a business that’s visibly investing in ensuring that their customers are well looked after.

Social listening can make your online campaigns incredibly effective

To maximize any online marketing campaign you need data. Even the advertising tools that marketers use, such as Facebook and Google Ads, rely on sophisticated algorithms that optimize campaigns using the data generated from serving ads.

Social listening is effectively a way to pool the data that’s being generated by you and about you on various social media networks. This data provides an incredible amount of insight about your customers and potential leads who might be better served by your service or product.

By simply leveraging the power of social media and spending some time on these networks to listen to what people are saying about your brand and responding in an effective manner, you can gain valuable insights that can be used to fine tune all subsequent paid and organic marketing campaigns.