Paid Ads vs. Organic Posts

We've All Seen Paid Ads

Social media advertising reaches their audiences either by pay-per-click (ppc) advertising, influencer generated content, or display ads. Most of the time, these ads reach you because you've been chosen as the brand's target market and this company is heavily paying for their ads to get in front of your eyeballs. These ads are generally easy to recognize due to the "sponsored" or "promotion" tag that goes along with the ad. While paid ads are almost guaranteed to repetitively reach their targeted audience, organic content reaches consumers more often by chance.

Don't Leave Your Ads Up To Chance

If your strategy is to build brand awareness, consideration, or conversions–paid ads are for you! According to HubSpot, the advantages of deploying paid advertisements on social media channels are: speed to market, campaign sustainability, and message frequency.

Paid advertising gives your campaign an extra boost to your target market, without playing around with social media algorithms. Another benefit to paying for your advertising is consistency. You can choose to continue targeting current audiences or new audiences, adding to advertisement frequency.

Organic Conversion

The one thing to be aware of with paid advertising is organic conversation and conversion. Organic posts generally become "viral" or popular because of the interaction between its consumers. No matter how much money you spend on paid advertising, you can't buy engagement. Comments, likes, and shares still need to come organically. Be sure to make the most out of the captions, text, and headlines you choose. The best kind of content is engaging!

Spotify Wrapped Campaign

Spotify #2019Wrapped Campaign was fun and personalized. I can remember everyone, including myself, sharing my music choices of the year on Facebook. This cool campaign compiled each user's most-listened to songs into a fun, shareable graphic. Spotify also created personalized graphics for artists. These shareable graphics included data like, how many fans they had, countries where their music was streamed, and total hours of streaming time.

Social Media Ad

These graphics were both organically shared between friends and discovered through paid advertising. This campaign was spread across Spotify, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Getty Museum Campaign

During 2020, Getty took advantage of people stuck in their homes, frequenting social media. They built a challenge that went viral on social media, that helped build brand awareness while bringing art to the forefront.

The challenge started on Instagram, with Getty's business account. The campaign was a challenge to folks at home to try to recreate their favorite artwork using things around the house and post photos. These posts quickly spread across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

This challenge became so popular, that it was still on-going six months later. According to Brafton.com, the hashtag #GettyMuseumChallenge has been used nearly 50,000 times on Instagram alone.

What is the Secret to Paid Advertising?

Engagement.

You can pay for several advertisements across various channels and reach your desired audience. The key to success is engagement. Your content needs to be worth sharing, it needs to spark a conversation, and welcome engagement from consumers. Viral content becomes so popular because the content gets shared, commented on, liked, etc. If you can create ads that invite engagement, you will be successful.