Happy Sunday! Hope you're having a great weekend and enjoying the last of summer. Today we're going to talk about social, and how best practices on social should really dictate your paid social strategies. There are a lot of differences in your creative strategies between paid social and organic social, but there are also a lot of differences. Today I'll share what each of them are, so you can understand how to best tailor your paid social strategies based on recent platform changes.
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How Social Media Is Changing
I think the first thing is, we've got to understand the current state of social media. Organic social people spend a lot of time staying on top of platform changes from how users are engaging with content, and I think paid social teams need to as well. Social as we know it is drastically different from just 3 years ago, and our strategies need to evolve. It's not really even social media anymore. Less and less of it is about keeping up to date with friends and the like. Chronological feeds are all but dead, and feeds of friends are less common too. They've been replaced by algorithmic, AI generated feeds of viral content based on what you've interacted with lately. Ever since TikTok took off, all other platforms have copied and have a similar thing going.
This means new types of content are now rewarded, and also penalized. Social is no longer about creating content for your fans or followers. Instagram is only partially the Instagram as we know it where you post pics of your vacations to your friends from college. Now about half of the content is a reel that is not from someone you follow. For the first time, it's likely a majority of views a post gets are going to be from non-followers. Short form, vertical video is the crowd favorite, and it's hear to stay. The TLDR is that Instagram is now TikTok, so adjust your brand's social accordingly.
Create more short-form video content, make it relevant for non-followers, and focus more on creating entertaining and compelling content instead of just making it look pretty.
How Organic Social And Paid Social Should Be Alike
I think there are a lot of parallels, or overlap between organic social and paid social. I'd argue brands would be more successful if the teams worked closer together on strategy, used some of the same content, and shared performance notes. The trends of a platform are relevant for both teams. I don't mean the latest viral sound or meme, but pay special attention to how users are engaging with content on the platform. At the end of the day, paid social and organic social teams are trying to appeal to humans on the same platform so there is more overlap than you think.
What kind of content is working well on organic? What types of formats seem popular and are doing well? TikTok has a "culture" where there are some very popular sayings, and Reels has separate ones. Both teams should be in tune with them. I rag on marketers getting ad inspo from competitors ads too often; instead I actually think people should be getting more inspo from organic social. If you're creating a newspaper ad, you'll get more viewership if your ad looks like a regular newspaper article. The same is true for social ads. You need to intimately know how users are engaging with organic content on a channel before creating ads for it. The less they look like ads, the more of a chance they have of getting seen and that is half the battle.
One last thing here. I really like Gary Vaynerchuk's concept of brandformance. Essentially, create tons of organic content and see what does well. The concepts that do well are likely resonating for a reason, so double down on those and then turn them into ads with more specific direct response messaging inside of them.
How Organic And Paid Social Are Different
Now don't get me wrong, there are definitely some major differences between organic social and paid social that should not be ignored. Organic social is much less about followers than it used to be, so top-of-funnel messaging is more important than it used to be. But about half of it will be seen by your followers, so you can't just sit there making ads all day. You need to sprinkle in content that is more bottom-of-funnel in nature. You'll likely want to showcase a wider array of your product category; outside of things that perform well in paid social.
Organic social is not direct response, so you should very rarely have calls to action in them. Conversely, you need a call to action plus several other direct response mechanisms to attempt to illicit a purchase in your paid social ads. It would be weird to do that on organic social. The only times we have such direct calls to action on organic social are during quarterly promotional periods.
You likely should work with the same creators across paid social and organic social. At times, they can even use the same content on each. We've done it occasionally, and sometimes it can work. But again, there are differences in style and amount of direct response persuasion tactics. But in general, I do think there is value in users seeing some of the same creators across them. Your paid social should feel like an extension of your social, not a disjointed separate thing. I definitely think that there should be lots of overlap between influencer, organic social, and paid social as well in a venn diagram fashion, which could be a post for another day.
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Enjoy the rest of your night, get a good night of sleep, and I hope everyone reading this finishes off August strong. I'll see you next week.
-Cody