The battle between organic and paid growth on social media is still raging. The issue at hand is whether it’s beneficial to grow your social media through paid efforts, and whether those methods are more beneficial than an organic approach.
Essentially, there are 3 ways to grow social media: paid authentic, paid “non-authentic”, and organic. Each has its own set of pros and cons, but what is the best way to grow your social media following?
Authentic Paid Social Media
Authentic paid social media growth happens when you utilize a social network’s ad platforms. Most of the major social networks are supported by paid advertisements. These paid advertisement platforms allow marketers and business owners to target specific demographics and other key factors to identify, and target there desired audience. This authentic paid approach can yield great results because it allows you to drill down and find the perfect target for your ad, on a copy by copy basis. This helps your target audience to be more defined, qualified, and more likely to convert.
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Don’t Water Down Your Paid Social
On the contrary, “non-authentic,” or “watered-down,” paid social media growth has little to no benefit.
A few years ago we saw an influx of people promising to grow social media followings, particularly Twitter, 10,000 followers over-night through the use of bots, or profiles set up by computers with no real users. Now we are seeing an uptick in “get more followers” websites. These sites allow you to put your profile, or content into an app or web page and generate more likes from other people that have done the same thing. While this may seem like a viable option to grow your following,this method is strongly discouraged.
Sure the followers you’re getting are “real” in the sense that they are real humans and not bots, but you are still generating likes from people that may have no interest in your products, services, or business. In fact many of these people will never visit your profile or website because these apps and sites allow you to do all actions within their ecosystem. So what you end up with is a large, disengaged, non-focused following that does not interact with you. A small, highly engaged following has far more benefit than a huge following that is not interested in what you have to offer. This is a true case of quality over quantity.
Organic is The Way
If you’re not generating real, meaningful, consistent engagement, your social media profile is useless. Size doesn’t matter as much as engagement. The best way to ensure that your social media following is a real sampling of your customer is to focus on organic growth methods. There are tons of ways to grow organically. Running contests and giveaways is a great method to use. Also cross promoting one channel or piece of content across your other social media platforms works as well. The possibilities to grow your social media organically are endless.
Read – “Social Media Marketing; You Don’t Know Jack About It!”
The Wrap Up
The problem most businesses and brands face is a lack of patience. With the exception of content going viral, most social media efforts pay off in the long run, not the short. This impatience leads to cheating and gaming of social media platforms, or at least attempting to. This impatience is social media’s own fault. It created a system of instant gratification, and we want that system to apply to social media itself. We want our social media marketing efforts to pay immediate dividends, but that’s not how social media works. One of the main purposes of social media is affecting your brand image. Everything that happens on social affects your brand positively or negatively. For the most part, brands are not built over night, and neither are social media followings. However, patience and consistency lead to increased brand exposure and positive sentiment.
In order to truly see the benefit of social media marketing, you cannot go into it blindly. Social media strategy is even more necessary now that social media is evolving so rapidly. A proper strategy will contain several methods for organically growing your social media profiles, helping you avoid the temptation to cheat yourself and your following by engaging in growth methods that water down your social media presence. At Average Giant Marketing we understand the need for your social media strategy to help you grow as large, and as rapidly as feasible. To this end we create all our social media strategies with a growth model that includes both organic, and authentic paid growth methods. For a FREE CONSULTATION, and to learn how Average Giant Marketing can help maximize your social media growth potential click here.
Do you have a written social media strategy in place to guide your marketing efforts? Does it contain a growth strategy? Have something to contribute to this post? Leave a comment below
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