We’re in a stage where organic reach is harder to get than it used to be and paid social media ads are accessible to anyone. Paid ads have been simplified and there’s an endless amount of research that’s been done, so you know how to do them right. So, is organic social media dead?
With the difficulty of reaching people organically, the question comes to mind, is organic social media dead? If you’re not organically reaching out to your customers, someone else will be. There are many benefits of posting organic social content, one of the main ones being you can be in direct contact with your customers and clients.
The reach is there, you just have to understand how the algorithms work to take advantage of them. So, let’s get into how the algorithms work on some of the more popular social channels.
LinkedIn is a great way to receive that organic reach, especially from personal profiles. You don’t need a hefty amount of followers to reach a hefty amount of people. LinkedIn really likes to show the posts that lead to and receive a lot of discussion in the comments. Gear your posts to be conversational, you can even end them asking a question to guide people to answer.
The downside to LinkedIn’s algorithm is when it comes to company pages. LinkedIn wants companies to pay for ads to get their messages out. Therefore, it does not push out company posts the way it does personal ones. So, if you’re managing on a company’s LinkedIn page, ask the employees to like, share, and comment on the posts to receive more reach.
Facebook is similar to LinkedIn when it comes to how they push out content. They put personal profiles over company ones. Now, don’t start thinking you can just post several times a day to get to your customers. That will only cause Facebook to consider you as spam, which will lead to your posts going to no one.
A great way to reach a lot of people on Facebook is through Facebook groups. You tend to receive 20-30% more engagement in groups than you do on regular posting. Like with LinkedIn, it’s great to post things that will get a conversation going.
Instagram’s algorithm has also changed since it first started, making it more difficult to reach your customers. It used to show photos on a user’s feed in chronological order, but they changed it to show relevant content. This means their friends and family first, then influencers, then companies.
Let’s also remember that Instagram is owned by Facebook. So, like Facebook and LinkedIn, they want companies to pay for ads.
A great way to get your customers to see your posts is to put up Instagram stories. I’m sure you’ve seen people put the picture they just posted on their Instagram to their story and then cover most of it and say “New post!”. This is because it drives more people to view the post and engage with it. Another strategy is to post user-generated content and tag the user. The user will see it and likely tell their friends and family about it as well.
Twitter is the easiest way to receive reach. You can tweet every minute of the day and none of them are less likely to be seen because of it. This also makes it a great platform to test out content. If something does well on Twitter, it’ll probably do well on Facebook and LinkedIn, too.
So, back to the original question, is organic reach dead? No, organic posts boost your company’s validity and it incentivizes people to follow your accounts. You not only encourage current clients to repurchase, but it creates leads!
