According to Social Media Today, there are tried and true methods for growing and SEO. Your business should invest in more organic content. Put some budget towards it. WHY? What is organic content?
In the early days of social media, businesses only posted content organically. Instead of having to pay for ads, brand content would naturally be shown in people’s feeds, and because of this, there was a heavy emphasis on creating good quality content that customers actually liked and would be interested in. However, over the years, as social networks have grown and developed, brands have lost their trust in organic content. One reason for this change is the increase in competition, which can sometimes make it feel like everyone is struggling to be heard through all the chatter, making organic content less effective. But one of the key reasons why people believe organic content is dead is because of social algorithm changes. In particular, Facebook has introduced and evolved their News Feed algorithm, boosting the reach of personal posts are reducing the reach of brand content. Such changes are a positive for users, enabling them to only see the very best and most relevant content in their News Feed. But for brands, the changes have been challenging - visibility of their content has decreased significantly, making it even harder to get heard amidst all the noise. To combat this, many businesses have turned to paid social advertising to try and get their content in front of their target audience. As such, brands are also increasingly shifting their budgets away from other activities, such as content creation. Why should your business invest more in organic content? In a recent article, CEO of Vayner Media, Gary Vaynerchuk, said that businesses should re-focus on their organic reach, noting that: “No amount of paid media is going to turn bad creative into good content” Often, social media feels like it is moving at 200mph, and in the mad rush to keep up, quality can sometimes suffer. After all, it’s not exactly easy to churn out blog posts, podcasts, videos, photographs, presentations, whitepapers and infographics all on a regular basis. However, whilst quantity can be important on social media, this shouldn’t be at the detriment to quality. Quality content matters, and will be the difference between catching the attention of a new customer and going completely unnoticed. If you're simply pumping out poor quality content, people won’t stop to look at it, click-through, or call. But more importantly - and what Vaynerchuk's statement points out - is that if you boost that same poor content with 100’s or even 1,000’s of dollars, customers still won’t be interested. Hence, sometimes going back to basics and focusing on creating really good quality content, which will perform well organically, can be the key to your social media success. Conclusion While there are most definitely benefits of amplifying content with paid social advertising, before you get carried away and spend 100% of your social media budget on it, take some to consider your content. Make sure you put enough budget aside to create good quality content in a variety of formats. Your content should be interesting, unique and engaging. If done right, customers will stop and look at your organic content, or better still, share it, without the need for advertising. This can also lead to a more effective use of your advertising dollars - by putting money behind content that first performs well organically, you're making a more informed decision on such spend.
Bottom line, what's the secret to SEO? Unfortunately, there's no magic formula to social media success. But if you want to find out how you can improve your social media reach, Consistency and QUALITY is key