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Social Media Marketing (SMM) in Digital Marketing

What is organic social media?

Organic social media refers to the free content (posts, photos, video, memes, Stories, etc.) that all users, including businesses and brands, share with each other on their feeds.

As a brand, when you post organically to your account, you can expect that the people who will see it are:

  • A percentage of your followers (a.k.a. your ‘organic reach’)
  • Your followers’ followers (if people choose to share your post)
  • People following any hashtags you use

For example, brands use organic social to:

  • establish their personality and voice
  • build relationships by sharing informative, entertaining, and/or inspiring content
  • engage customers at every stage of their buying journey
  • support their customers with customer service

But of course there is a downside to organic social. The reality is, because all the major platforms use ranking algorithms, only a small percentage of your followers will see your organic posts. For instance, the average organic reach for a Facebook post is about 5.5% of your follower count. For big brands with large followings, it’s often even less.

What is paid social media?

Paid social media is another word for advertising. It’s when brands pay money to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc. in order to have their content shared with specific new targeted audiences who are likely to be interested, either through “boosting” their organic content, or designing unique advertisements.

More so than organic content, paid posts are the best way for brands to target new audiences on social media, and convert them to customers. Businesses and organizations use paid promotion on social to:

  • raise brand awareness and attract new followers
  • promote their newest deal, content, event, etc.
  • generate leads
  • drive conversions (including e-commerce sales)

How to integrate a paid and organic social media strategy

  • Dont pay for always

only pay for ads when they can actually help you hit your KPIs and ultimately reach your business goals. 
A creative, original, organic campaign will build buzz all on its own. Craft a compelling post, pin it to your profile or drop it in your Stories highlights if it’s big enough news.

  • Boost your best organic content

Identify content that has really resonated with your audience, and pay to show it to new eyes.
For instance, you could start by allocating a small budget to the top weekly or monthly post whenever you run your analytics report. Don’t just pay attention to likes, but also conversions, profile views, etc.

  • Optimize by A/B testing

Before you allocate your entire social media budget to an ad, run versions of it by a smaller audience to see if it’s any good. Test your CTA, copywriting, visuals, and the ad’s placement, format, and even the audience targeting. You can also test it among different audience demographics (age, location, etc.)

For organic posts, you can set up manual split tests and track results by using UTM parameters in your links.

  • Target your ads to people similar to your organic audience

Most social platforms offer the ability to create lookalike audiences based off of your best customers, as you describe them. Perhaps these are your newsletter subscribers, or people who have engaged with your profile or content, or people who’ve bought a product in the last year. A lookalike audience will be composed of people with similar demographics and behaviors, but who haven’t been introduced to your brand yet.

  • Use retargeting ads

Retargeting campaigns can be highly effective at a relatively low cost, because you’re reaching out to people who already know your business. Maybe they visited your profile or website, or even abandoned a shopping cart.

  • measure your results

if you pay attention to your social analytics tools, they’ll tell you where you need to make changes to get better results.

  • Automate as much as possible

Schedule your organic posts in advance
Streamline your approval and copyediting process
Set up customized triggers for boosted posts

Major SMM applications

Signals

Signals are the infrastructure for the machine learning processes that let you understand your customers' behaviors, optimize ads and free up time for what's important.

That is the metrics of Instagram like views, likes, shares, followers, and comments. A measure of these metrics is called Social Signal. The bigger the social signal, the higher are your chances of succeeding online. Here is how you can boost the social signal of your Instagram page or account.

Facebook Custom Audiences

A Facebook Custom Audience is a targeted advertising service that allows businesses to import user email addresses for retargeting on the social media platform. Custom Audiences are an effective way for online businesses to interact with relevant users across multiple channels.

Facebook Pixel

The Facebook pixel is a piece of code for your website that lets you measure, optimize and build audiences for your ad campaigns. You can think of this as an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website.

SMO vs SMM

SMO is more passive and long-term, while SMM is more active and short-term.
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