Organic vs Paid Social Media: Weighing the Pros and Cons
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Social media platforms are popular spaces where digital users can generate and consume content, engage with peers, and stay up-to-date on ongoing news and trends.
As platforms like Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest have amassed billions of users, brands have heavily invested in them, performing both organic social media marketing and paid social media execution activities.
However, organic and paid social strategies differ substantially in their approach and impact. This blog discusses both strategies and how to use them effectively.
Organic Social vs Paid Social: A Comparative Analysis
Financial Model and Business Function
The fundamental difference between organic social media marketing and paid social media execution lies in their financial models and underlying business functions.
In organic social media marketing, brands create free profiles on social media platforms and publish non-paid posts. In this case, the brand acts like a typical social media user, posting regularly and engaging with other users.
Brands perform organic social media marketing mainly to establish a presence and voice on the social media platforms where their audience resides, fostering an ongoing dialogue.
Paid social media execution refers to executing paid campaigns that serve targeted ads to users engaging on social media platforms.
This “pay-to-play” model drives brand performance through impressions, clicks, leads, conversions, acquisitions, sales, and other user actions.
Software Interface
To perform organic social media marketing, teams select a platform and download the standard app available to all users. Here, they create an account, maintain their profile, publish free social media posts, and engage with other users.
To execute paid social media campaigns, teams must use the corresponding ad manager software of the chosen social media platform. For instance, if they want to execute paid social campaigns on Meta and Snapchat, they must use both Meta Ad Manager and Snapchat Ad Manager.
Content Formatting and Demarcations
The organic posts brands can publish on social media platforms are almost always limited to the same formats available to standard users.
Meanwhile, brands can access a broader array of content formats with paid social media. They can serve ads with native features, meaning the team provides their ad creative and copy, which the platform then blends into its interface to look like an organic post, with the exception of the required demarcation of “ad,” “sponsored,” etc.
Many social media platforms offer additional paid ad formats, such as dynamic ads on LinkedIn, Marketplace ads on Meta, as well as AR filters and pre-roll ads on Snapchat.
Content Targeting, Placement, and Reach
Organic content typically reaches only the brand's profile followers. If a post includes hashtags or gains significant traction, it might also appear in the feeds or discovery sections of users who do not follow the brand.
Many social platforms now include continuous scroll functionalities with algorithms that constantly serve organic content to users based on their behaviors and interests –think TikTok and Meta Reels. While this helps place organic content in front of more users, brands ultimately have little control over where it ends up.
Teams executing paid social media campaigns have more control over where their content (ads) appear. Using the social media platform’s ad manager, teams can meticulously craft and select—even activate—audiences to serve ads to, targeting users based on criteria such as demographics, geographic location, interests, and behaviors, regardless of whether they follow the brand’s profile. Brands can even target their ads to appear in specific contexts and topic sections of the social platform.
User Engagement
Users can interact with a brand’s organic social media posts by liking, commenting, and sharing; brands can further engage with users via messaging, adding comments to other organic posts, and even dabbling in influencer collaborations.
Depending on the platform, users can like, comment on, and sometimes share paid social media ads that have native formats. The aforementioned dynamic ads on LinkedIn, AR ads on Snapchat, marketplace ads on Meta, and content ads on Reddit, among others, provide even more in-depth user engagement opportunities.
Lastly, users can click directly on paid social ads, navigate to a landing page, and further engage, even convert. This creates a speedy user journey.
Speed of Results
Paid social campaigns typically deliver more immediate results. Upon launching such campaigns, the social platform begins identifying and serving ads to relevant users. Moreover, these platforms can often optimize towards driving fast results, whether in clicks, views, conversions, etc.
The results of organic content can depend. Some brands might experience a slow build-up as their content gradually reaches their followers, sparking modest engagement. In contrast, others might see their content go viral, achieving extensive reach and interaction shortly after posting. This is unpredictable.
Cost, Time, and Resources
Organic and paid social both require hefty costs, time investments, and resources.
To perform paid social media execution, teams must learn how to use ad managers, spend time preparing media plans, developing creative, and building campaigns. Next, they have to put up the budget to launch the campaign while optimizing, tracking, and reporting on performance along the way.
Brands don’t have to pay to publish any organic social content, but it still takes lots of time and money to maintain social profiles, plan organic campaigns, and create organic content.
To perform either paid or organic activities, brands almost always need to invest in an in-house media team or outsource. Both increase overhead costs.
Performance and Cost Analysis
Ad managers used for paid social media execution can report on impressions, clicks, conversions, and other cost-per-metrics, allowing the team to discern how much they spend compared to how much performance they drive for their campaign.
Organic social media activities generate less data. Brands can monitor basic engagement metrics such as likes, comments, shares, and occasionally views and impressions on their organic posts, but this only somewhat speaks to brand health and performance. Often, teams need to invest in additional social media platform analytics tools, like Sprout Social, to better discern organic performance.
Understanding Organic Social Media
Exploring the Benefits
Solid Base to Cover
Social media platforms have mass user adoption and are free to use. This makes it worthwhile for brands to have at least a baseline presence on a few social media platforms, as it is an easier way to keep the door to potential use engagement always open. Nowadays, we even see that it is basically an implicit expectation for brands to be present on social media, for if they aren't, it can hurt users' perceived legitimacy.
Flexibility With Content
Brands can post many different types of organic content on social media, including photos, short-form videos, articles, products, and more. They can also post as frequently as they want, daily, hourly, or monthly.
This flexibility enables brands to let their uniqueness and identity shine through. Especially for more prominent brands, with the luxury of having established audiences, this allows them to take their organic content in much more creative and dynamic directions. Duolingo has been a key example of this lately.
Photos from Duolingo Instagram profile.
Quick Execution and Testing Opportunities
Organic social media is nimble. Brands can create and publish organic social posts relatively quickly. This ease of use allows for spontaneous and reactive content that keeps brands relevant in fast-moving social conversations.
Examining the Limitations
The most significant limitation of organic social marketing is reach, as organic content is primarily visible to the brand’s followers. This means brands must invest considerable effort into building this follower base, which is not straightforward or linear but requires consistent organic content posting over time.
Even when a brand has a substantial follower base and incredible organic content, it can still feel like it falls short. This is because there is no guarantee that this organic content will reach every follower or that each follower, ultimately, falls into the target audience.
The Power of Paid Social Media
Showcasing the Advantages
Paid social media offers unique capabilities that are particularly powerful due to what's often referred to as "walled gardens." These social platforms amass vast amounts of first-party data from the millions of user interactions and engagements they oversee daily.
Leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms, these platforms consider this data when making buying and ad placement decisions for paid social ads, serving ads to users they believe are most relevant to the brand’s campaign and goals.
The high degree of targeting accuracy this model can provide enhances campaign effectiveness and remains a key selling point for engaging in paid social media strategies.
Discussing the Drawbacks
The main drawbacks of paid social media execution are higher costs and increased complexity. To execute any paid social campaign, teams have to have a media budget to spend. To ensure effective media execution, brands also need media experts, established workflows, and a robust tech stack.
Not all brands can afford to make these investments or feel fully equipped to understand the minutia of paid media. Therefore, they have to rely on independent agencies.
For independent agencies managing paid social campaigns for multiple brands, these investments and complexities multiply, commonly requiring a Media Execution Partner (MEP).
How to Choose Between Organic vs Paid Social Media
Teams should not feel compelled to choose exclusively between organic and paid social media strategies. In fact, the majority of effective social media strategies utilize both.
Organic social media will commonly need to precede paid social efforts, as brands need to build a presence within the social media platform and prime their audience organically before serving ads. When users are more knowledgeable of the brand and leaning in, teams can then leverage paid social to drive performance during key moments like sales, major product launches, event signup periods, and more.
Employing both paid and organic social media strategies also comes in handy in cases where teams find it challenging to justify the budget for a given paid social campaign. They can default to organic social media tactics and still get traction. Even better, teams can double-dip, for if they run a paid social campaign, it is easy to repurpose and post the creative on organic social channels to magnify reach. Below are two paid social ads on Instagram that could easily be repurposed into organic posts.
Organic and paid social are better together!
In Conclusion…
Organic and paid social media strategies differ significantly. Organic social media marketing involves posting free content on a brand's social media profile, while paid social media execution refers to executing digital media campaigns and paying to serve ads to users as they engage on social media platforms.
Both strategies are unique in their own right, requiring distinct software interfaces, investments of money and resources, and catering to different business functions and user experiences.
As brands, agencies, and other entities strive to reach their audience more effectively, they will likely need to invest in organic and paid strategies. Most importantly, they shouldn’t shy away from using both!
If you want to decode how your independent agency can better execute paid social media that complements organic social efforts or if you're struggling to advise brand clients on whether they should invest in either tactic, reach out to a Media Execution Partner (MEP) like Pathlabs.