While social PPC campaigns can be a great way to generate some quick visibility and clicks, all your paid efforts are going to depend on a strong organic foundation that fosters natural, steady growth over time.
If you’re building a social media strategy that’s oriented towards dependable, long-term development rather than a quick fix, it’s essential to familiarize yourself with “organic first” methods and practices that will make your social profile a natural part of your audience’s day to day usage.
In this post, we’ll go over four best practices to include in your organic social media strategy.
1. Know Your Audience
One of the best things you can do for your social media strategy is study your target audience’s browsing habits, and make sure you’re distributing your marketing resources in a way that reflects this.
Social media tools like Highperformr analytics platform will show you which of your social media profiles get the most engagement. However, leveraging these kinds of tools requires a little time to build up data.
If you’re just getting started with an organic social media strategy, it’s important to build detailed buyer personas that show you your audience’s relationship with different social media platforms, and the brands that appear on these channels.
Some key things to consider for developing these personas include:
- Which platforms your audience uses, and how they divide their time between each one.
- The kind of content your audience values, e.g detailed industry insights, stimulating discussions, eye-catching videos, etc.
- Your brand’s current share of voice on your main platforms and the other main players who you’re competing with in this area.
By developing a detailed understanding of your audience’s preferred platforms and their behavioral trends when interacting with brands, you’ll be able to distribute your resources in a way that’s efficient and proportional to your customers’ preferences.
2. Build a Content Calendar Using the 80/20 Rule
One of the biggest mistakes brands make when it comes to their organic social media strategy is failing to plan a long-range content calendar.
Developing a content calendar that looks several weeks or months into the future will ensure you can keep up a consistent posting rhythm over a long period of time, and avoid the risk of scrambling for an idea on posting day or publishing something sub-par.
What’s more, building a content calendar can help you identify patterns in the way you post on different platforms. This will help you maintain a certain level of variety, and help you avoid posting too much of one kind of content.
When you’re developing a content calendar for your organic social media strategy, we recommend applying an “80/20 rule” to the planned topics of your social media posts. By this, we mean making sure that 80% of your content focuses on topics that are informative or entertaining with no commercial aim, while the remaining 20% can focus specifically on promoting your products or service.
This will help ensure your branded content feels natural and authentic in the eyes of your audience, and prevent your social media feeds from becoming saturated with loud, promotional posts.
3. Join Communities and Share Insight
Platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn have specific ‘groups’ features where users can join online communities, follow news around a particular topic, and have discussions with likeminded people.
Becoming an active part of these groups can be a great way to boost your organic social media strategy, as it naturally encourages you to get involved with discussions around industry topics that are likely to engage your audience.
In this environment, you’ll have the perfect opportunity to “flex” your knowledge and share unique insights that will set you apart as an authority. This will encourage steady, organic growth in your following, and show your audience that you’re a trusted source of insights on the topics they follow.
Remember, even when you’re working on social media platforms that don’t have a designated “groups” feature, like Instagram, you can still join less formal communities and establish your brand as a key part of the conversation. To do this, make a point to follow people and businesses associated with your industry who already see a lot of engagement from their content, then look for opportunities to offer fresh, interesting takes on trending topics and evergreen content.
When your audience notices your brand coming up regularly in engaging discussions, you’ll quickly be established as a staple of the topic-based community, even if the platform you’re using doesn’t have formalized groups.
4. Involve Your Leadership
The executives at your company are likely to have the most reach out of any of your team members, so involving them in your organic social media strategy is usually an effective way to build your brand’s reach and stimulate conversations.
Aside from relaying your content to a broader audience who may be following your executives, but not your brand, getting executives involved in your organic strategy will also give your content a more authentic and personal quality that can help drive engagement.
At its most basic level, content amplification will simply involve asking your executives to share your organic content as it’s published on your branded profile. However, there are further steps you can take to optimize this practice to ensure you get the most from it.
One of the best ways to do this is encourage executives to tweak or redraft content in a way that speaks to their social media following specifically. Your VP of marketing is going to have a very different following to your operations manager, who will have a different following to your CEO.
There are a variety of ways executives can tailor a piece of content to their following for better engagement, including:
- Using post titles that target profession-specific keywords and jargon.
- Using different visual assets that highlight stats from your content if they’re particularly relevant to a certain profession.
- Rephrasing pertinent points of the content in the executive’s own tone of voice for better resonance with their following.
- Tagging people from outside the organization to invite their opinion, start a conversation, and amplify your content’s reach even further.
Obviously, your executives are busy people, and it may not be easy for them to find the time needed to tailor every post to their following. One effective way to help the process along is using generative AI tools informed by basic parameters about your executives’ professions and followings to create good starting points that re-posters can tweak and fine-tune.
Supercharged Social Media Strategy
Getting results from an organic social media strategy can feel like a slow burn at the best of times. However, by adopting these best practices, you can quickly develop a rapport with your audience and extract more value from your organic content calendar.
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