Talking about social media landscape, there is no denying the fact that it is among those things that are constantly evolving. With new networks rising to fame, technology evolving thereby increasing user participation and real-time content, the existing networks enhance their platform and product with the right use of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram and including “buy” options there.
Oh well, in other words – organic social reach has been going through a rough patch of late. Organic reach is shrinking badly, as the leading networks are stomping over the paid channels to typically monetise platform investment.
What says the digital marketing company in Kolkata and across the country? How do they optimize the organic search strategy?
Organic social reach – what’s that?
Organic Reach is a metric used in social media marketing to show the number of unique accounts that have seen a post on a social media platform. It is basically the number of views a particular post receives. Organic reach doesn’t include the use of any paid promotional tools, which might have been used to boost the visibility of the post.
How to work on organic reach improvement?
Organic reach is undoubtedly among the fundamental metrics in social media and one of the most important factors that determines the expected engagement rate of a post. It goes without saying that the more organic reach you have, the more engagement you can potentially receive.
If your content is interactive enough to grab eyeballs, it means that there are more chance of that content of being engaged with likes, comments, and shares. That is the reason why marketers are always in search of strategies that would straightaway boost the organic reach of their content and posts.
One of the major factors in determining your potential organic reach is the number of followers you might have. But that is not it. There are several other things you can do to distribute your content to maximise your reach organically. These strategies include hashtags, shares, stories-share, and sharing to other social media platforms. Among several distribution funnels, there are other strategies too which can be used.
Essential strategies to improve your organic social media marketing:
No one would disagree with the fact that to build a successful organic social media strategy is one of the most daunting tasks today. But then, it is certainly not impossible. The sudden demise of organic social reach and its effectiveness have been lamented by everyone starting from business owners to social media marketers.
Before you conclude, let us project it that organic social media is an effective way to work on your brand awareness. With the right implementation of a good organic social media strategy, you can do it even better. The right techniques have the abilities to eliminate barriers to purchase, and have the right inputs required to inform people about how your product works. It can also answer customer service enquiries and at the same time, can build a community of engaged fans.
Brands, irrespective of industries, can achieve success with their organic strategies. And once they master the art of growing social media organically, you too can achieve success with your respective businesses.
Here are few ways to improve your organic social media performance.
Your audience must be known well
All you need to do is to take in one of these essential strategies, and the main one should be to know your audience better than they know themselves. You can never succeed in the competition for organic attention if there is no tailor-made content produced for your exclusive audience. Everyone uses social media for their own purpose – educative, informative, and of course for entertainment and engagement. But then, the details vary from audience to audience.
Hence, it is extremely important to know your audience better, and if possible to know them way better they know themselves. Things to keep in mind must be the exact group of audience that you are trying to attract. You have to modulate your brand’s voice, style, personality and content to suit their preferences and search habits on social media platforms.
It is very specific as per individual preferences, but that is exactly the point. Be as specific as you can. Giving your audience a specific persona name is also helpful at times. Do remember, that understanding your unique target audience segments is the real essence and foundation of any successful organic social media strategy, as agreed by any trusted company dealing with social media advertisement in Kolkata or anywhere across India.
If possible, try to place yourself in the shoes of the target audience to figure out what they demand, and to make sure your brand’s social media presence passes the audience test. The purpose of your brand being on social media is to recognise that you are the brand for them. It is crucial to make an emotional connection, before they themselves could figure it out.
It is also advisable to come up with a brand style and what exactly it does convey to the target audience. Whether or not your content is attractive also does matter. Doing this technically ensures and affects how your content performs organically in the newsfeed. The more personalized your posts are, the better the chances of your audiences to engage with them. And it directly increases your organic reach.
Make sure to make your brand unique
The first thing to ensure is that your brand is much more than your logo and tagline. There are a several things to communicate with the right combination of your logo, brand elements, fonts, and color palette. Each combination must fit in perfectly with the realities of your brand experience.
When it comes to buying a certain soap, you must be able to tell which brands are good and which to avoid, which ones are good for your fabrics and which ones don’t make the colors bleed. All these, just at a glimpse at the packaging and you are good to go! They all would possibly be the same thing, but there is something that insists you to buy your regular brand.
This is what you would personally adopt for your brand to make it organically more effective on the social media platforms. After all, you have gone to the effort of creating specific content, and it has a job to do.
Remember – your first job for any post is to make people stop scrolling. You want your audience to stop scrolling and check out your content. To do that, you have to come up with multiple strategies as done by the brands to achieve the attention of your target market before they can engage with you. This is nothing but knowing your audience.
What’s beyond branding?
The traditional aspect of branding is by sticking to your visual style, though you need to pay attention to your brand tone of voice as well. Social media branding is much beyond branding in the logo or color sense. Every interaction with a user is included in the branding and brand personality.
That technically includes everything from reviews, to check-ins, to private message replies and everything that actually brings down your brand presence to the last details saying something about your business, and your brand as a whole.
In a competitive market full of savvy consumers, with an access to information to a level never achieved before, it is suggested to provide them a reason to choose your business over your competitors. Hence, offer them with as many reasons possible.
Content must be the centre of attraction
Invest in content marketing to make your organic social media strategy work. The first step is to anyway know your audience and to be sure who you are producing content for. Up next is how to produce content that meets the quality consistently. Any reliable content marketing agency in Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad or anywhere in the country would agree that it is important to know how to efficiently work on the content production without blowing the entire budget on something that might or might not work to fit in each of your social media channels.
As a brand, you would want to commit regularly to your audience to offer something way more than what they love to consume. In other words, engaging them in the right way needs consistent quality as today’s audience surely knows if you have dropped the ball.
Investment, the right way
Start investing in the content process, and trust us, it involves more research than you had thought. Irrespective of whether it is a blog, or a video, or graphic content, invest in the right process, the right platform to publish them, and the entire process to work on the content strategy. Sub-par content doesn’t fit well with the consumers in the power seat.
Do think about buying specific equipment like lighting, microphones, tripods, and editing software in case you are aiming to produce visually attractive and interactive content in-house. You may also think of involving some copywriters and creatives on staff.
That’s not it. Irrespective of whichever avenue you are adapting for your content and brand use, there needs to be a strategic approach to your content production.
Specifications and details to be noted
Your social media content also needs to be thoroughly designed and edited to match the platform it is meant to be published in. Say, if you are making content for Facebook and Instagram stories, make sure to make it in a way that it fits vertical format. All social media content must be covered with proper captions enabled for people who watch with the sound off or for the disabled ones.
Source credit is must
Another important thing to note is that the sourcing content photos and static images must contain their source information. They must be must be checked for copyright, so if you can use it, be sure you credit as appropriate.
Don’t post watermarked images, and do make sure to go for high-resolution images from free sites like Pixabay or Pexels where you can source quality images for free. You can also buy images from Shuttershock if you want to invest in your content strategy. If you are creating your own graphics in tools like Canva, don’t forget to watermark your own photos, re-size or edit as required to maintain the authenticity.
Organize your content in a calendar
Once the steps rolled in knowing who you are making the content for, what specifications it must carry, and how to credit the sources for your content, it is time to organize the publishing. To begin with, it is a great way to maintain a content calendar to make sure your content theme and format is maintained in a way not to make it repetitive and old.
To make sure that your articles do link back to your websites, use relevant and original photos, video, polls, and product updates. You can make changes easily by maintaining a digital calendar of your proposed social media posting as content invariably comes through that’s more time sensitive than your evergreen content.
Social media is extremely fluid, and that’s why you must leave spaces in your content calendar to post content that are time-sensitive and might consume much of your scheduled regular routine. There are several editorial calendars that allow you to easily organize your content for the upcoming days. That way, you would know exactly what posts you have been publishing across platforms.
Consistency to be maintained
Not only to maintain regular records, a content calendar also helps to post consistently. As a result, the effectiveness of your organic social media strategy is maintained throughout and with result driven efficiency.
It must be noted here that you don’t have to post daily on every platform. Choose platforms, posts, and frequency very wisely, and not just for the sake of ticking it off your to-do list. If done so, you are probably not considering your audience. Do your research to find the days and time that your audience is most likely getting engaged with your content. That’s the way you can make the most of your organic reach. Planning in prior about your posting allows you to concentrate on creating specific audience centric content that fits in the platform and gets posted in a timely manner.
Data driven strategies
Data is the only thing that you can really rely on while building strategies. Interpreting that data into what makes it meaningful and relevant to your brand that might vary as per your goals and audience. Don’t make it complicated though.
Guess what data helps to do – it makes you familiar with your social media metrics and helps to track only the important ones. Organic social media is the ultimate destination with the data driven reach, engagement in terms of likes, shares and comments, retweets, video views, and link clicks, of course. Whether you are under or over performing, it needs to be understood by the figures and statistics of your brand’s benchmarks to come up with the actual story.
Social media platforms like Facebook allow you to export your page insights to let you have a glimpse of a treasure-trove of data. You can also enlist the help of a social media management tool to help you overview your data less manually. Tools like Socialbakers Analytics provide a granular overview of your key performance metrics across several platforms in a single spot.
Another thing to note that though the well-performing posts might give you a warm feeling, don’t forget to keep a close eye on your negative feedbacks too. More so, in case you are finding lots of “report as spam” responses or “hide posts” from your audience, time to check and time to step back. These responses can very easily rip off your organic reach if you continue to gather more negative feedback.
Social media is ever evolving and needs regular monitoring and testing for new things. Refining your content formats and themes can lead to finding out what your audience responds to, and it would ultimately help to improve your performance.
Selling should never be your focus
Brand pages often see people talking exclusively about themselves. When it is organic social media, the term organic must be focused on. And it does never include anyone who talks only about himself and his own brand by boasting.
Feel free to talk about your products, their features, and how your product or services can make people’s lives better. You can post about your latest sale or promotion, but that must also include break-ups of other engaging content to provide value through variation.
Organic social media is the platform that lets your audience get to know you better to build the trust needed. It is the display place of whatever you can learn about your audience, what they like, and what they are not approving straightaway. Shoving your sales and boastful messages can eventually ruin the overall image. Instead, operating on the groundwork till it is clarified for both you and the audience is the best thing to opt for.
Conclusion:
Organic social media is the exact thing that helps you to establish a relationship with your audiences. You need to do anything and everything that can nurture them accordingly. Remember, organic social media marketing isn’t dead, all it needs is the proper grooming and nurturing to make it work the right way. Blaming the algorithm for lack of engagement is not going to work. Instead, take a pause, take time to stop and think about your audience, reconsider your content and dive into your analytics.
Afterall, sometimes, going back to the basics and simplicity is the best way to improve your organic performance on social media.
