Even if you have a solid organic social media strategy and a high posting cadence, this doesn’t mean your social followers are seeing your content. Social remains largely a pay-to-play game as the algorithms favor paid over organic content, unless that organic content is so surprising that it breaks through the clutter. This is a rare thing and very difficult for brands to do regularly.  

In our 2021 analysis of organic social reach, we found that, on average, an Instagram post organically reaches only 9.4% of total followers. It’s even lower for Facebook, with only 2.2% of followers seeing the organic post. If you have 100,000 followers on Facebook, your organic post will only reach 2,200 of your followers. It has not improved in recent years.

This is where paid social media comes into play. Supporting organic social content with ad dollars will increase your organic reach and the likelihood of showing your content to not only your followers but also users beyond your follower base.

Tips

Paid can be used to promote all your organic content, priority content, or top-performing content. Below are considerations for each approach to help you decide which is the best for you.

All Organic Content

If you want to promote all your organic content, you’ll need a sufficient paid budget to ensure each promoted post gets a meaningful spend. For example, if you have a limited budget, consider creating fewer organic posts to ensure your budget isn’t spread too thin, or switch to one of the two strategies outlined below.

Priority Content

Identify what you consider priority content. Is it an event, product launch, or giveaway that’s important for your followers to see? Once you’ve determined that, allocate your paid social media budget accordingly.

Top-Performing Content

Social media is unique in that high-performing content also gets amplified more cost effectively than low-performing content.

To execute this strategy, create thresholds for each platform based on your past performance. Select metrics that are important to you and easily accessible. For example, if shares are important to you, use it as your metric for identifying top performers. These thresholds will be markers for whether a post is performing well and should get ad dollars. Give your post time to collect data. Wait 24-48 hours before checking performance to see if it meets or exceeds the threshold, then put paid behind the top performers.

Organic Strategy

No matter your approach (all, priority, or top performing), when promoting content, use your organic strategy as a guide when deciding your budget, ad objective, optimization, and targeting.

Budget

Consider the channel priority, content cadence, and social objective weighting in deciding how much to allocate toward your organic post. For example, if Facebook is the primary channel with the highest content cadence and Instagram is your secondary channel with the lowest cadence, allocate more budget per Facebook post than Instagram post. Additionally, if your post falls under your primary social objective, allocate more spending to this post than a post under your secondary objective.

Ad Objective/Optimization

Selecting the appropriate ad objective and optimization for your promoted post is key to the success of your promoted post. Use the goal of the post when deciding which objective and optimization to leverage. For example, if you’re looking to maximize reach, use the Awareness objective and Reach optimization. This will inform the ad buying system to reach the most users at the lowest CPM.

Targeting

With paid, you can target your followers or those beyond your follower base with interest, behavior, and lookalike targeting, just to name a few. Consider your target audience when building your targeting to ensure you’re reaching the appropriate users.

Final Thoughts

Paid media is key to increasing the reach of your social posts. Before promoting your organic content, have a plan for determining which content to promote (all, priority, or top performing) and how to promote it (budget, objective, optimization, and targeting). Having a game plan is key to maximizing the results of your organic content.