Organic Social Media

5 ways to keep customers you got through paid content

Paid social media is about advertising and promotions. Organic social media is about relationship building and making connections.

BY ELIZABETH BREEDLOVE

There is a lot of emphasis on managing paid advertising on social media, but organic (unpaid) social media is just as important.

Although paid content can be riskier because it involves hard-earned dollars, organic social media is more difficult in many ways. Social media tends to be a “pay-to-play” marketing tactic, which often makes it a challenge to achieve a large reach on popular platforms. But despite the inherent challenges, organic social media is a key aspect of a well-rounded social media marketing strategy.

It might be easy to think that because of the typically much lower reach of organic content, these types of posts aren’t important. That’s not the case.

Paid social media efforts are where you acquire new customers, but organic social media is how you keep them. Whereas paid social media is about advertising and promotions, organic social media is about relationship building and making connections. Well-managed organic social media improves customer retention, which means you can spend less money on customer acquisition—including paid advertising.

So if organic social media is important, what does it mean to do it well and do it right? Consider these five tips.

1. Remember that organic social media is about building connections with customers. To that end, use your profiles to deepen relationships.

Make it known that you check your inbox or direct messages frequently to answer questions or provide other information. Publish posts that ask questions related to your invention or industry, then engage with and respond to followers. Use your social media accounts to create opportunities to interact with your customers and followers, building a community around your invention.

When you use organic social media to build relationships, you’ll enjoy an increase in customer loyalty—and, if you do it well, a decrease in the cost of customer acquisition.

2. Work smarter, not harder; repurpose your content. Even though you have a passion for inventing, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. If you have created content for use elsewhere, reuse it on your page.

Suppose you published an article or blog post with 10 helpful tips related to your industry, similar to this one. You can summarize each tip with one or two sentences, then add a question to the end of each to provide an opportunity for your followers to engage with your post and comment.

Voila! You have 10 things to post on your account. Later, depending on how frequently you post, you can revisit those 10 posts, tweak the language slightly, and post them again.

You can repurpose almost any content in this way. Just don’t make your content too promotional. It’s OK to mention promotions or sales, or to talk about your latest invention or a new product launch, but aim to follow the 80/20 rule and have about 80 percent of your organic social media content be focused on engaging your followers and customers, and have 20 percent more promotional or sales oriented.

3. Don’t be afraid to mix it up. Trying new types of organic posts is painless because you’re not putting money behind the posts. If one post has a lousy performance, that’s OK; you spent no money and you can keep posting as much content as you want.

If you’re not already posting videos, that’s a great place to start! Experiment with publishing different types of videos—from something very promotional to something that shows off your personality like a behind-the-scenes tour, to something fun and outlandish like your team re-creating the latest viral Instagram or TikTok challenge.

4. Have a plan for managing comments. One of your biggest goals with organic social media should be to increase engagement and comments, but you need to have a plan in place for managing the comments you get. Ask yourself:

• Who will be primarily responsible for monitoring your social media accounts and managing comments?
• Do you plan to respond to most comments? How quickly will you respond?
• How will you handle negative comments?

My recommendation is to have someone monitoring and responding to comments who knows your brand and invention very well, and who can check in and manage comments at least once a day Monday-Friday.

My typical approach to negative comments is four-pronged:

• If it’s a negative comment on an ad, I delete or hide it. I don’t want to spend money promoting something that someone else is using to drag me down, so I get rid of it.
• If it’s a negative comment but can be politely corrected, I do so—maybe if the commenter is misinformed about a feature of your invention.
• If it’s negative but more of an opinion (for example, “this is dumb”), leave the comment up but don’t engage with it.
• If it’s highly inflammatory or offensive, remove it.

Remember, it’s your page and you get to choose what’s on there, Keep in mind that if you routinely delete all negative comments, most likely someone will eventually notice and make a big deal out of it.

5. Take what’s good and make it better. This tip can be applied in many ways.

For one, pay attention to what types of content get the biggest reach and engagement, and try to shift your strategy to include more like that.

If a piece of content is performing remarkably well, consider taking it to any relevant Facebook groups you are a part of and sharing it there. Posts in Facebook groups often perform much better than posts on Facebook pages.

And finally, one last tip specifically for posting on Facebook. Facebook has a “Boost Post” feature that allows you to pay to turn anything you post into an ad. If a post is performing exceptionally well, reaching more people than normal and seeing great engagement, consider spending a little money to get the post—and your brand or invention—in front of even more people.