The importance of paid social

Social media marketing is a relatively new discipline in the digital world. Now, with huge numbers of brands and businesses looking at ways to increase their brand awareness and engagement, social media platforms have become essential.

The meteoric rise of social media has resulted in rapid changes to algorithms, as the major platforms searched for ways to monetize their offering – pushing paid social to the forefront when searching for success.

How do I get my content seen?

The average user is potentially exposed to 1,500 stories every time they log onto Facebook. So-called ‘super social users’ are exposed to 15,000. All of these stories compete against one another for users’ newsfeeds and attention spans. Rather than exposing users to every update, Facebook’s new algorithm filters newsfeeds using 100,000 different factors to decide which posts will get prime real estate on timelines and which ones will fade into the background.

It’s survival of the fittest – Facebook favours posts not only because they are most deserving of engagement but also because they have received investment to encourage that engagement.

Whilst it is absolutely essential to have high quality content feeding your social media strategy, you need to start investing to get that content seen and grow your audience.

Check out this example

Below I have taken a look at a client of ours operating in the art industry. We were seeing some good engagement levels among Facebook users who already ‘liked’ the page, but we weren’t getting much growth and were struggling to attract new followers. In order to increase the visibility of the brand we joined forces with our content and social team to work out who we needed to reach to start generating some more likes.

We set up a campaign with the objective of driving page likes, focusing it on users in the US and UK between the ages of 35 and 55 who have indicated an interest in abstract art. This campaign gave us the opportunity to reach between 950-2500 Facebook users each day.

From day one this campaign was a huge success and the increase in page likes from the implementation of our campaign is undeniable:

When we analyse this even further we can see the breakdown of new likes by organic and paid ads:

When we think of social media marketing we immediately focus on well-established brands and core campaigns that they have run. Brands such as Innocent drinks are well known for their comedic tone and are rewarded through increasing followers and likes. That said, it’s much easier for a company of this size to increase visibility when their presence was already established pre-social media, as organic reach is naturally higher.

In order for new and smaller companies to boost their visibility and start generating engagement at this level, paid social is required to ensure content isn’t just another post disappearing off the bottom of someone’s news feed.

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