Organic Social Media: Is It Worth Investing In For Your Business?
Organic social media – when invested in correctly – can have tremendous positive effects on your business: increased sales, more leads, great brand awareness, rapid business growth, just to name a few.
However, the strategies employed for growing your business with organic social media are different for each business, industry and target audience – with the results varying by an extreme margin.
In order to make the most of organic socials, you’ll need to understand the good and the bad to see if it’s something that can work for your business.
That’s why the team here at The A Firm have compiled an insightful breakdown on the precise benefits and shortfalls of using organic social media to grow your business!
Organic Social Media – A Definition:
Organic social media is everything on Facebook & Instagram that you don’t pay for. This includes:
- Posts
- Status updates
- About Us section
- Replying to comments and messages
- Stories
- Photos and Videos on your page
- Blog posts
Essentially, organic social media is everything you see at first glance upon visiting an Instagram or Facebook page.
This includes responding to your followers and the followers themselves. In business terms, organic social media is primarily the domain of social media managers, who control your posting schedule, brand voice, and community management.
This does not include paid socials, such as Facebook ads or boosted posts.
Advantages Of Organic Social Media
Engagement:
One of the biggest advantages you can have on social media is an engaged audience. Ideally, when you post about your product or service, you want a percentage of your followers to take an action – I.E. buy your product. The more engaged your followers are, the more sales you can drive consistently, for free.
Social Proof:
Modern audiences are extremely wary of who they buy from. Having hundreds – even thousands – of loyal, recurring customers rave about your product or service on social media posts will dispel any doubts potential new prospects could have about you. Moreover, positive reviews will nudge fence sitters over into a sale.
Word Of Mouth:
Organic Facebook & Instagram are extremely effective at broadcasting your brand to large numbers of new customers. Everyone that likes your page will send a newsfeed update to their friends. This has a compounding effect: the more people engage with and follow your organic social media, the more your business is shown to their network of friends.
Shortcomings Of Organic Social Media:
Time Commitment:
Unfortunately, growing your social media following organically takes time. A lot of time. Even following a rigorous posting schedule, it will be many months before you see any return on investment. This is definitely a strategy for the long-haul.
Trolls & Negativity:
As with form of exposure, the more people your business reaches, the more chance you have of reaching someone who doesn’t like your brand or simply delights in ‘trolling’ you. This is the act of intentionally disrupting your social media posts with profanity or harassment. Avoiding this will require careful and consistent social media management.
Consistency:
Speaking of consistency, growing your organic following only works if you stick to it. The more you post, the more momentum you gain; but miss a week or two, and that same momentum is quickly lost. Modern audiences do not want to visit a FB or Instagram page that has not been active for at least a month and this could lose you sales.
Consider Your Strategy
Using your organic social media to grow your business’s sales and website traffic is a proven strategy, & one that works exceptionally well for some of the world’s top brands.
At a certain point, it is a fundamentally necessary step to grow your business past ceilings; no modern-day business can reach the top 1% without engaging with social media.
The good news is that if you’re starting out, you can absolutely manage your business social media yourself. In fact, we highly recommend starting this way, as it gives you an insight into how social media and your business can work together.
However, there will inevitably come a point where you’ll need to outsource the management of your organic socials. Properly managing your post schedule, replying to every post and message, and creating your own content, simply becomes too much of a time investment for a business owner.
Contact The Experts
Are you looking for ways to grow your business outside of social media? At The A Firm, our qualified & experienced team of bookkeepers have 150 years of combined experience in growing Australian small businesses from the financial side. Contact us today for your free 15-minute strategy call!