8 Tips for Building an Organic Social Media Strategy

You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to build a successful social media strategy. Some of the most successful strategies are organic, requiring minimal investment. Using an organic social media strategy will save you resources while creating longer-lasting content that continues to bring in quality traffic.Learn how to create a social media strategy without paying for ads or paid content.

Benefits of Having an Organic Social Media Strategy

Why should you build an organic strategy, and what are the advantages of organic traffic over paid traffic?

Organic Content Saves You Resources

The most apparent benefit of organic traffic is that it’s free. The average social media ad cost-per-click ranges from about $0.97 for Facebook to $3.56 for Instagram. While that investment has a time and place, some traffic doesn’t need this large of an investment.Organic social media strategies only require an initial investment for content creation, including paying for rights, supplying products, researching your plan, and creating the media for your social media account.After creating and sharing that content, your investment is minimal as the content works for itself, unlike ads that require a continued investment as the campaign runs.

Organic Content Builds More Trust with Your Followers

Organic social media is more personable than paid ads. A paid ad is often a one-way interaction where you display an offer, and your viewers accept or reject it. However, organic strategies rely on relationship building and exploring customer insights to do correctly. This results in customized and engaging content.The following chart demonstrates that building trust leads to loyal customers and more sales.

Image from SuperOffice

Organic Content Has a Longer Lifecycle

Paid advertising and sponsored content only work if you keep paying for the campaigns. Meanwhile, your organic social media campaign continues to work and only adds to its engagement.For example, a video on Instagram will remain on your profile, collecting follower responses. If you also add hashtags to the post, it will also continue to appear in hashtag searches. As you create more organic content, you add to your current content. This organic social media growth increases your reach and impact, as your content has a higher chance of appearing across the platform.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Related Content: Discover More Ways to Drive Organic Traffic

Learn more about organic social marketing strategies to improve your social media results.

• What Is Social Media Marketing? A Basic Guide for Businesses
• Advice for Finding the Best Social Media Marketing Agency
• How to Craft a Social Media Strategy for Your Unique Business
• 10 Reasons Why Content Is King (And How to Do Content Marketing In 2021)
• 5 Things Companies Need for Success with Ambassador Programs

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8 Ways to Build an Organic Social Media Strategy

Use these eight strategies to build an organic social media strategy to increase your traffic and engage your followers.

1. Promote Your Brand on Your Other Channels

Promoting your social media channels through online locations you own doesn’t cost a cent. You can bring more traffic to your social media by linking to your channels through your:

• Business website
• Google My Business
• Online directory listing, like on Yelp
• Marketing emails
• Print materials

For example, when a customer purchases your product, a thank-you email can encourage them to follow you on social media to find more deals and great products. These strategies bring engaged and loyal customers to your page, which increases your engagement rate. Those followers are most likely to interact with your brand as they already use your products.

2. Engage with Your Followers

Comments you leave on social media are also considered organic content. A comment increases your engagement rate by encouraging customers to respond to you or leave a message. Commenting shows followers you are an active account that responds and cares about your followers.Even negative comments are a chance to show your good customer service. Responding to a negative comment can increase a customer’s advocacy by 25% but ignoring the complaint can decrease your customer advocacy by nearly 50%.You can drive new traffic to your social media by commenting on other accounts, pages, and groups. For example, if a Facebook forum discusses a problem, you can offer a solution related to your brand and products to encourage readers to visit your account.

3. Use or Create Hashtags

Hashtags tell a social platform and users what your content is about. It helps others find your content and increases your chances of appearing in social media searches.You can find the most popular hashtags in your industry by performing an industry search or researching through a social media hashtag tool. Choosing a hashtag with too many posts means your content might get lost, but too little engagement decreases the number of searches. Therefore, a middle-ground hashtag often has the best chance of success.Try to only use one or two hashtags on Facebook and Twitter, while Instagram allows you to add up to 30.Sometimes the best way to drive traffic to your social page is to create a hashtag for a specific campaign that encourages conversations around your brand. For example, Dove regularly creates brand-specific hashtags, like #DetoxYourFeed, which encourages users to post body-positive posts and fight against toxic beauty standards on social media.

Image from Dove

4. Post Engaging and Relevant Content

Data and consumer insights are the backbones of your organic social media content. Without it, your content is built on a guessing game, which will waste time and can hurt your reputation when you don’t get it right.You can find what content your followers want to see, what questions they want answered, and what triggers consumers to act with customer insights.An excellent guide to follow when choosing the type of content to create is the 70-20-10 rule:

• 70% of your content is educational and addresses customer questions
• 20% of your content is emotional, like inspiring stories or funny posts
• 10% of your content directly promotes your products and services

5. Reward Your Audience for Interactions

If you aren’t seeing the engagement and social media organic growth you would like to have, consider encouraging your followers to interact with your content by offering an incentive. You can also use social media to reward loyal customers who already consistently engage with your content.For example, you can promise a discount, shoutout, or free product to followers who complete an action. Some actions might be liking your post, subscribing to your account, or sharing the post. You can also share content from your loyal followers to show your customers that you recognize and appreciate their loyalty.By encouraging follower interactions, you increase the visibility of your content.

6. Optimize Your Content and Profile

Optimizing your profile and content helps you target a specific audience for higher-quality traffic. Social media optimization is the practice of creating content so that social media channels and users can find you.When you optimize your social media correctly, you are more likely to show up on the feed or in the searches of those interested in your brand rather than showing up randomly to nonrelevant consumers.Use these strategies to optimize your content:

• Audit your profile to make sure the settings and message reflect your brand
• Use specific colors, fonts, and styles to brand your content
• Tag relevant people and pages to increase links to and from your content
• Research and use relevant hashtags
• Optimize content before repurposing it for other social channels
• Use external links wherever applicable
• Use keywords to appear in non-hashtag searches

7. Post Strategically

When you post your content and how often you share new media matter for your organic traffic. Finding the ideal time and number of posts will require some trial and error before learning what works best, but there are some guiding benchmarks that brands follow to increase their chances of more organic traffic.For example, some of the highest social media engagement occurs Tuesday through Thursday around 9 a.m., while the least engaging day is Sunday.While posting during a peak time means there are more eyes, you also risk getting lost in the buzz. Unless you already have an established organic social strategy, you may have difficulty getting seen.That’s why some businesses will post when there is less competing content. While that often means fewer viewers, you can still see a higher engagement rate because online users have a greater chance of seeing your content.When deciding on your posting frequency, less is more. If you post too often, your viewers may feel overwhelmed and stop paying attention to your content. An ideal benchmark is publishing high-quality content once or twice a day. On Facebook, the average page posts 1.55 times a day.[caption id="attachment_3829" align="aligncenter" width="1254"]

Young woman using cell phone to send text message on social network at night. Closeup of hands with computer laptop in background[/caption]

8. Use Organic Influencers

Organic influencer marketing is more cost-efficient than paid influencer marketing and can add more authenticity to your brand because their promotions are often more natural.Organic influencers are often known as brand advocates because they don’t always have a large following. However, their recommendations are still valuable as 79% of consumers make purchasing decisions based on user-generated content on social media.An organic influencer will recommend your product simply because they are loyal to your brand and aren’t motivated by financial gain. You can encourage organic brand advocacy by:

• Building relationships with potential influencers in your industry
• Connect with users who are already talking about your brand
• Sending free products and promotions
• Offering a mutually beneficial partnership where you promote their page in return for brand promotions

Some of your best brand advocates are within your own company. Employee advocacy gets your employees involved with your organic social media marketing strategy by promoting your brand and products on their accounts.

Invest in Your Organic Social Media Marketing Strategy

Organic social media works best alongside paid strategies as both have a role in driving traffic and converting visitors. We have hands-on experience with both types of social media strategies. We use the latest tools in the industry to find relevant insights for optimizing your social media content for the best results.Contact us to learn more about our social media strategy services.