Paid Advertising vs Organic Growth. What You Need To Know.
Growing your social influence is important. Two metrics matter, the overall engagement of your audience, first and foremost. And secondly, the size and quantity. You can grow this influence by organic content or use paid advertising – or a combination of both.
Of course beyond “just posting” content you need to lead your community further into your sales funnel to nurture them to buy from you.
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Engagement vs Follower Count
Having 5 followers on Instagram that are highly engaged is nice.
However, you do need some measure of “heft” or “weight” of followers to get meaningful traction.
You also need engagement.
Having 1 million followers and only 1 comment is NOT good at all.
It means you probably got your followers via spamming them or buying them. Having 500 followers and 450 of them commenting is POWERFUL.
Organic Social Growth
Organic social growth, on any of the social platforms, is about 3 main things.
First, creating great content. That’s the NUMBER ONE thing that’s most important. Content that’s of importance to your community 0f followers.
Second, it’s about creating a LOT of content. Posting on Facebook, once a week, won’t get you much traction. You’ve got to post with some measure of frequency.
Third, it’s about “hacking the algorithm”.
For example, want to get better traction on LinkedIn, understand how important it is to comment on other people’s content. (I beg you – read this LinkedIn post for some cool tips)
Here are a few key ways to grow your follower count and build engagement with just organic content, no paid advertising:
- Know who your audience is and post content that they will want to know about
- Post engaging questions / content that they can engage with
- Comment on other people’s content. Be seen as a source of value on platforms
- After you post content, such as doing a Facebook Live, then promote the content
Paid Advertising
To do paid advertising correctly takes time (patience) and having an evolving understanding of how advertising works on the platforms you wish to use.
You need to understand who your audience is and what they want. Knowing this will help you create the best copy and imagery you can use in your advertising and help refind your targeting.
I’ve been on a new journey of preparing to leverage the power of Facebook advertising and here’s just a wee bit of what I’ve been going through:
- Gathering my email lists so that I can leverage Facebook advertising tools to show ads to my existing community.
- Use these emails to enable Facebook to find more audience segments similar to what I already have.
- The advertising expert I hired is also reviewing my existing landing pages and adjusting the copy and the imagery.
- Ensuring you can track advertising actions through to my website and final purchase actions (or any other actions that we need to track) is essential. It’s a waste of time to spend money on advertising and not do your best to track the results. Advertising that works is good advertising that you want to keep investing in.
I’ve been posting content to social media for years – and publishing a consistent email newsletter and blog content. It’s now time for me to test the waters of paid advertising and impact even more lives.
Both Options are Important
Paid advertising can help to quickly scale your business, bring you more customers and help you reach a larger audience.
Organic content takes time to succeed and it does work.
My recommendation is to FIRST leverage and do well by posting content. Then invest in paid advertising. Get someone to help you who knows the ins and out of paid digital advertising.
[Check out our growing library of Smart Hustle Guides – these guides include tips on networking, social media, personal branding and MORE.]