Social media constantly evolves and it has been in the spotlight more than ever in the last few years. Throughout Covid, people were able to socialize with their friends and family from far away. New social media platforms have emerged, and some older ones are growing more than ever.

Businesses better understand the importance of social media; how it can allow them to build relationships with their customers and attract new ones. Social media has always been a game of content and algorithms. Social media has adopted its own form of SEO in a way that the algorithms focus on creating a positive user experience. Engaging content gets pushed to more users. 

Businesses with large digital marketing budgets often pay for social media ads - this can ensure their brand gets in front of users but can be expensive. It is usually much more cost efficient to create engaging and valuable organic content on social media. Many businesses take the hybrid approach, where they focus on creating organic content on social media to engage existing customers and find new leads, but also use paid social media ads to target specific groups or retarget warm leads. 

Organic social media is highly competitive, so if your focus as a company is on producing organic content on social media, then you should have a proper strategy in place to take advantage of the potential it holds. But let’s first understand, what is organic social media?

Top ways to optimize your organic social media

Create regular content around engaging themes

There are certain types of content that you can regularly create for social media that work really well. Coming up with themes for different days gives you a great starting point for organic social media content, as opposed to having to come up with different posts from scratch every day of the week. Some of the top examples for themes for organic content on social media:

1. Tips and Tricks

2. User-generated content

3. Posts that humanize staff

4. Case studies

5. Memes

Focus efforts on the right platforms

The idea of being present on every social media handle might sound exciting, but it is often not practical. You can really maximize your ROI by focusing on 1-3 platforms where your audience are active, as opposed to spreading yourself too thin by trying to be present on every platform. For example, for a B2B kind of business, it is very practical to create content on LinkedIn to grab the attention of their target audience, which is other businesses on LinkedIn. On the other hand, for DTC brands, it is more practical to optimize their content strategies on Tiktok or Instagram. Meanwhile if you're targeting an older audience you could look at Facebook. A good thumb rule is to analyze your competitors on social media. See what kind of content they are putting on their different social media handles and how much engagement they are receiving. If most of your competitors are preforming poorly on some channels, it might be a good idea for you to avoid those channels too - unless it's a new platform and you can get a competitive advantage there by understanding it first!

Post the right kind of content

Figuring out what content works best for you requires patience but once you can find the sweet spot, you can expect to get high engagement for your organic content. TikTok and Instagram Reels have skyrocketed the amount of video content being produced on social media. Videos get the most engagement on Instagram and having video content as a part of your organic content strategy helps to grab your users’ attention for longer. Although every brand is now trying to get on the TikTok and Reels ride, it may just not be the perfect fit for your brand! Testing your content and seeing what kind of content pulls the highest engagement for your brand is vital. Once again, looking at your competitors’ data can be a really effective way to figure out how you can create more engaging content on social media. 

Interact with your users

User-generated content is some of the best organic content. What is user-generated content? When your users have tried and tested your product/service, go out of their way to create content for you in the form of reviews, testimonials, and ratings. Your future potential customers are more likely to start using your product/service if they hear something great about you from another customer. Interacting with your users creates a community, which gives a sense of connection to your customers and they feel valued. Customers love it when companies keep them in a loop not just before they start paying them but also after they become paying customers.

Maintain a balance between valuable content and promotional content

Now of course you will be using your social media handles to promote your products/services to your existing customers and potential future customers. But it is important to keep a balance between the kind of content you create for your users, and the balance between value-added content and promotional content.It is always advised to stick to the 80/20 rule. 80% of your content should be valuable and useful, while the other 20% can be more promotional. So if you're posting 5 times a week, you should allow yourself one post about your business for every 4 posts that add value to your audience. When you attract new users through your 80% of value-added content, there is a good chance of them coming across your 20% of promotional content, which can nudge them onto becoming a paying customers.

Promote your social media profiles

There is no point in doing all these above efforts if no one knows about your presence on social media. Always make sure to have your social media handles mentioned on all of your assets (both paid and owned).

Test, optimize, and go again!

There is no real trick or magic behind getting big on social media. The strategy that works for you might not work for others or what works for them might not work for you. The real key is to test your strategies and then optimize them accordingly. Social media is a vast ocean of both opportunities and data. If you get the hang of it, it can quickly become a really powerful positive feedback loop.