Social media has increasingly become a pay-to-play market. Now that advertising is an option, platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn limit the reach of organic company posts in an effort to encourage more money spent on advertising. With that in mind, do you need to invest in ads in order to see success on social media? We’ll explore a few different options for growing your audience organically and with ads.
The Short Answer
No. You don’t need to spend a single penny on ads. However, it can absolutely help speed things up.
Growing Organically
Whether you want to save on ad spend or prefer to grow organically, doing so is going to take a little more time. In order to see success, you’ll need to be consistent. This starts with choosing the right blog niche and sticking to it. Develop a consistent blog schedule — every other week is a good place to start, with a goal to ramp up to weekly blogging when you’re able.
From there, you’ll want to utilize drip campaigns to get the most out of each of your articles. Each blog can become a dozen social media posts, spread across a year or more. For this, a social media scheduling tool is your friend. You can schedule out all the posts promoting your blog at once so you don’t have to worry about posting in the moment. Be sure to use a variety of relevant hashtags and follow other platform-specific best practices.
Don’t just promote your own content. Share content from adjacent industry sources as well. Consider the topics your audience cares about or would be interested in learning more about, then curate content on those topics.
Engage with your desired audience. Go out and find accounts that align with your target audience and start engaging with their posts. One of the best ways to get someone’s attention is by liking a few of their photos and leaving thoughtful comments. Find the people who would find your content interest and show them what you have to offer. Social media is about getting social, after all.
Growing with Paid Ads
Paying for social media ads can help you accomplish your follower and engagement goals quickly. However, you may not see the same quality of followers as you would when growing organically. It’s important to regularly evaluate new followers and leads coming in through your paid ads. If these don’t align with your target audience, you may need to re-adjust your targeting settings.
Start by building an audience based on the demographics and interests of your target buyer. You’ll likely learn more and more about your audience as you begin growing it, allowing you to further refine your targeting.
Consider the different stages of the buyers’ journey. When you’re advertising on social media, chances are that most people seeing your ads will have never heard of you. This makes it important to give your audience the appropriate context they need about your brand or services. It’s a good idea to start by running some higher-level awareness-based campaigns before moving on to more sales-focused and follower-generating campaigns.
Supporting Your Organic Efforts with Paid Ads
You don’t need to go all-in on social media advertising in order to see returns. In fact, you can do a lot with just $50 spent each month on ads. Run small, test campaigns to experiment with and refine your creative, audience, and messaging. Apply your learning to your organic efforts in order to improve your results. If you have an organic post that does particularly well, use the boost feature to promote it more widely.
Through consistent organic efforts and strategic investments, you can quickly grow an engaged following on social media. Explore how Missinglettr can take the manual effort of developing social media content off your shoulders.
