As our favourite social media platforms become increasingly a pay-to-play space, in this two-part series Social Misfits Media’s Managing Director, Natalie Clarke, takes a look at the benefits of paid media and how organisations can make a little budget go a lot further.

Over the past couple of years, there has been an obvious, and sometimes extreme, decrease in organic reach across all social media platforms. If you are following best practice by monitoring your performance on a monthly basis (read our #MakeItSocial publication if not), this will not be news to you. To be clear, organic reach is NOT dead, but newsfeeds are prioritising content from family and friends, and those that spark conversations as opposed to ‘reactions’ such as likes and loves.

In this two-part series, we look at why you should be paying attention to paid media and making it part of your overall social media strategy.

Part One: The Benefits

Social media success starts and ends with your community — they are your organisation’s biggest asset. If you’re not reaching the right people, you’re not going to see the engagement you’re looking for.

As Social Media Managers, we need to put an increased focus on our social media community; learn from them, and understand what’s resonating with them to ultimately mobilise them to take the desired action. Social paid media can help you do exactly that. Here a number of the benefits you’ll see by allocating some budget to your social media activity.

1. You can reach more of your following and people beyond your following

According to recent research by Social Media Today, organically, your content is going to reach roughly around 6% of your following. With paid media, you can reach a much larger percentage of your following, as well as people outside of your following. This will increase the awareness of your organisation and will help to increase the engagement rate on your content.

2. You have greater control over who sees your content and when

Newsfeeds are no longer in chronological order, and they haven’t been for quite some time now, so while you are posting relevant and timely content, it may not reach your audience’s newsfeed when you want them to see it. With paid media, you can target the right audiences and schedule it so that they see the content on the day you would like them to see it.

3. You can deliver the right message to the right people at the right time

If you have multiple audiences that you need to speak to for different purposes, you’ll be creating multiple posts in order to get your message or ask across. With paid media, you don’t need to put all of this content on your social feeds; you can make sure that the right posts get to the right audience through strategic targeting.

4. You can learn more from your audience

The data pulled from social paid media allows you to learn a lot from your audience and the actions they take with your content. This information goes beyond the best time of day to post, or the number of clicks your link had. You can look at the devices they were using, the number of landing page views, whether it resulted in a Page follow. Paid media allows you to carry out tests to further understand what messages work best for different audiences, whether they are more receptive to video content or stills, what calls-to-action drive the best performance, and much more.

5. You can track traffic to your website

If you have implemented a Facebook pixel and Twitter tracking onto your website, (a small piece of code that lets you track clicks through to your website), you will be able to report how your social media content is driving traffic to your website. If you get very technical, you can also report on whether this converts into a donation or sign up — which is great for measuring ROI and impact. This will help you to report more meaningfully on the impact social media has on supporting your organisation’s overall goals. With pixel tracking, you are also able to create audiences for retargeting based on certain actions they take on your website. To learn more about this, here’s a guide on creating Lookalike audiences.

6. Increasing engagement on your page through paid should also help with organic reach

If you are continuously increasing the engagement rate of your content by reaching the right people with strategic paid media targeting, you are essentially increasing the overall engagement with your page and therefore (technically) you should see an increase in your organic reach as a result. As we mentioned, organic reach is not dead, you just need to pay a little more attention to what your audience wants to see from you to get that engagement rate up!

7. Paid media works in real-time

Unlike other advertising platforms, social paid media is real-time, so if something is working really well, you can put more budget behind it. At the same time, if something just really isn’t working, and it is far too expensive, you can turn it off straight away. You pay for what you get, and you don’t have to commit to the full budget if your learnings tell you it’s not driving the results you need. This is extremely useful if your budgets are limited.

So, in summary, there are lots of opportunities with paid media — from easily (and cheaply) increasing your reach and engagement to enhanced reporting, understanding your audience better and having greater transparency on your social media ROI. In the next instalment, we’ll highlight some of our top tips for a successful paid media campaign on a budget.