Eric Siu and Neil Patel break down organic social (free reach from posts) versus paid social (ads and influencer fees). They explain how paid promotion can seed engagement that keeps generating free traffic afterward, and recommend boosting your best-performing posts rather than constantly chasing new content.
Today, we are going to talk about the difference between organic social versus paid social. So I think people, and when I listen to a lot of these rooms, when I, when I'm hanging out in Clubhouse, people are getting social confused. They lump paid and organic in together and people are like, oh my God, Instagram, this, that, that. And so I think it's really important to separate the two and understand what the core differences and the benefits are. Neil, you want to start first? Yeah.
So organic social as Organic social and organic paid— or not organic paid and organic is really simple. Organic is what you're getting for free and paid is what you're getting by spending money. Paid could be you spin up some ads and you're doing a like campaign, we're getting some likes or some link clicks. It's up to you on what you want to end up promoting. Some of the channels, some of the networks allow you to promote your social profile, some of them do not. Some of them will allow you to promote specific content. And when you pay for it, that's pretty much paid. When you just post naturally and you get traffic for it, or you get likes or you get shares or comments, that's considered quote unquote organic. But here's the thing, and this is where it gets tricky, and this is where a lot of marketers make mistakes. You can use paid to get you more organic. What we mean by that is you can end up starting off with paid. So let's say you post the content. I'm on Instagram. I post an image or a video. I want people to watch it, get to know me, get to know my ad agency. Unless at the end of the video I promote Neil Patel Digital and indirectly I can generate more leads or customers. I may end up promoting it. And if I end up promoting it and only spend $20 or $10 or $50, whatever the amount is, I'm going to get some engagement. Assuming the content's good and I'm getting a lot of comments, a lot of likes, a lot of shares, it actually at the same time can increase my organic reach and my organic traffic. And even if the money has ran out and I'm not paying to promote it anymore, if I got a lot of engagement with the paid portion of the traffic, so if I got a lot of, if they create a lot of comments and shares and everything like that, it can actually keep continually creating more quote unquote free organic traffic.
Yeah. I think for me, when I think about paid, it's when you take dollars out. So it could be you're paying an influencer or you could be paying the platforms. Organic would be you posting something and then expecting organic reach to go up organically, right? Or free. And when I think about how I do it, So Neil explained the differences, but when I think about, okay, if I have a post and I put it up on Instagram and if it's actually performing, and Instagram will tell you this is performing 95% better than other posts, that's when I might consider actually boosting the post to get more reach on it, to extend it. Because if I find something's going, why not double down on it? Because ultimately my goal, at least with social, is to get more reach, more eyeballs on me. We're talking about the rule of 7, which I now think is a rule of 14 or the rule of 21 now to get people to take an action. So I just want more people to see my stuff. And same thing with influencers too. If I find that there's one influencer and I can use a tool like mightyscout.com, Mighty Scout helps me find different influencers and I can make like different campaigns. And let's just see the ones that work out best. And from that point on, I can continue to pay those influencers and just continue to double, triple down. I think the issue with marketing a lot of times is that we're trying a lot of things and we forget that, hey, if we just have one thing that's working really well, we should double, triple, quadruple down on it. And, um, it's going to do well for us for the long-term. So we don't need to have all these kinds of— we don't need to continue to be on the hamster wheel for social. I think the problem with social at times is that you have to keep putting out new content. But if you find something that's working really well, the ad platforms would be more than happy to take your money.
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