Many are reaping rich rewards from laser-targeted paid reach on social media sites. Does this mean organic social is doomed? Sean Ashcroft investigates
Our entire lives are sponsored, daily, from dawn to dusk. Before the sheet marks have slipped from our faces, the TV weather is brought to us by cod liver oil. By the time our aching limbs have just about warmed up, chardonnay and single malt are bringing us chat shows to keep our livers company. In between, our every click and step is shadowed by salespeople, making sure we’ve enough of everything.
Social media’s the same – worse, in fact (or better, depending on your take). It seems no social content is unsponsorable: tweets, trends and accounts; Facebook posts and pages; LinkedIn updates and even InMail. In social, our every eyeball-flick clocks sponsored content of one sort or another.
But hang on: didn’t social media used to be free? Why are so many of us now paying for reach? Does this mean free social is at the end of its rope?
Absolutely not, counters Hannah Rainford, senior social manager for digital marketing agency, Jellyfish.
“That’s like saying SEO is dead,” she says: “Organic and paid activity each have their own benefits and pitfalls. If you optimise, build relationships and provide great content that’s shareable and targeted, organic will work for you.”
Still. Isn’t buying social attention a bit like, well, cheating – like paying people to turn up at your 40th?
Unequivocally no, says Martin Dinham, sales director of Barracuda Digital. He stresses that it’s not about paid, or free, but quality.
“People won’t engage with irrelevant or low quality content, regardless of whether it’s paid or not. If you have great content, paid social is a completely valid way of bringing it to people’s attention.”
Social semantics
Before delving any deeper into this paid-versus-free issue, some etymological housekeeping is needed. Why? Because what many of us happily call ‘free’ social media is actually one of our heftiest social-marketing overheads.
“Social media is not free, whether you use so-called ‘paid social’ or not,” says Tom Ball, director of digital at multi-discipline agency, Immediate Future.
“Social media is very time consuming and resource-intensive: you need to build content plans, create the content, measure the impact, listen and respond and train your people how to do all this properly.”
So it’s not paid-versus-free – it’s paid-versus-organic. That’s that cleared up. But while we’re at it, there are more social-marketing buzzwords that need nailing – because their meanings are blurring, along with the boundaries between traditional content marketing, native content and sponsored content.
So, for the purposes of this piece, we’ll take sponsored content to mean stuff that’s designed to be read, and native advertising as stuff that’s designed to be shared. (A nod to noted ex-Reuters journalist Felix Salmon for this distinction).
Paid versus organic
Now that we’re warbling from the same social media song sheet, let’s ask: ‘Is paid reach better than organic reach?’ Does it have a higher ROI? Does it deliver greater visibility? Is it more targeted? Are more leads generated this way?
Jellyfish’s Rainford says one of the great advantages of paid social is ‘targetability’. “You can target who sees your message down to a granular level. For example, if you’re targeting those working within a specific industry or with a certain job title, you can use LinkedIn Ads to target them.”
Others find that sponsored content is even better for target practice than ads.
“We’re helping our clients enjoy success with sponsored content, especially on LinkedIn and Twitter,” says Ball. He adds: “We find sponsored content works better than display advertising. Not only because it can be far more targeted but also because of the depth of story and the ability to spark debate and discussion.”
Katie Canton, head of social media at B2B agency, Birddog, reminds us that organic content and paid content must work in tandem: that strong organic content is boosted by paid media.
So what, exactly, are all these businesses pointing their super-honed target audiences at? Sometimes, not very much at all, says Canton. “Bad advertising is common in social media. I think people are lazy with it exactly because these ads can be so targeted. I see a lot of B2B companies pushing whitepapers this way – companies who link to a whitepaper with a banner ad thinking that this is content marketing. They’re missing the point: it’s all about the mix. Whitepapers are part of the mix, and not the most exciting part, either.”
So we reach the crux of this debate: the mix. It’s all about the mix.
Let’s stay with whitepapers – those solid, often stolid, staples of B2B marketing. Just how should businesses use these in ‘the mix’?
“Whitepaper content lends itself to being broken out and sponsored effectively on LinkedIn,” explains Ball. “You can break-out key stats, stories and statements, and use them to seed debate and drive traffic and, ultimately, lead generation.”
And what of organic social? Where does this sit in the mix? Slap bang in the heart of it, that’s where – because at the heart of social media are people. These, I’m told, are organic.
“With social media, things always get broken down to a human level; it’s about individual connections,” says Ball.
So in this sense, even paid social is strongly organic. After all, your bulls-eye target audience still needs to make human decisions over whether to stick or split when you point them at content.
But actually, for many B2B businesses, often it’s not a question of paid social versus organic social at all. Rather, it’s one of paid social versus no social.
Success from paid social
Take Marketo, a company that provides analytical tools to help B2B marketers drive sales revenue, and which recently ran a sizeable Promoted Tweet campaign. Its choice wasn’t ‘free tweets or paid tweets?’, it was ‘paid tweets or email and online campaigns?’
Marketo wanted to maintain its 1700 global client relationships, but also build new ones. Noting significant spikes in relevant tweets during industry events, the company used Promoted Tweets to join conversations during key B2B conferences.
It reported a 400 per cent increase in lead-to-form conversion compared to email and online channels, and at a lower cost, too.
“Twitter is the water cooler for B2B marketers,” says Marketo’s social media manager, Jason Miller. “These individuals are starving for good content in an easily digestible and timely format.”
Another B2B brand using paid social to good effect is NewsCred, a SaaS (Software as a Service) business with US and UK offices. For two months from October 2013, the company ran 20 content campaigns using LinkedIn Sponsored Updates. Each piece was pitched at a selected target audience.
Again, the choice was not between paid social and organic social, but between paid social and Google Adwords.
“For every $1000 spent on Sponsored Updates, we acquired 71 names,” says Rachel Bassini, director of strategy and operations at NewsCred. Based on the value of these names, Bassini expects the company to earn $17.50 in revenue for every $1 spent on Sponsored Updates (compared to just $3.1 per $1 of spend for Google Adwords).
The truth is, whether your business pays for reach on social sites or Google, or if it relies solely on unpaid organic reach, the engine driving success is always content; paid services are mere after-burners. And, to stretch the analogy to snapping point, the pistons powering the engine will always be people. And what are brands, if not a collection of people? Businesses are waking up to the social media power of their people on an industrial scale, encouraging them to be online ‘brand ambassadors’. And it already has a name: social selling.
Educating your people
“This is a growing trend in social media,” says Ball. “Organisations are training their employees to become a voice of the business, and encouraging them to share content that will be useful to customer and client prospects. The potential is huge – it’s the word of mouth principle on a truly massive scale.”
Ball adds: “What’s interesting is many employees humanise the content, by posting interesting pictures of themselves at tradeshows on Instagram, for example. This is important, because social media is about making human connections.”
Canton agrees the human connection is important and believes brands should be making more of their employees on social. “I believe social media works only if the whole company has bought into the idea of it. Companies are realising employees are their biggest assets when it comes to social media.”
But the cost of social selling in terms of time and training is high – knocking the cost of paid reach into a cocked hat.
“It involves a lot of training,” admits Canton. “Everything from basic things, such as explaining to sales teams what a retweet is, to teaching staff how to conduct themselves online. But employee engagement is definitely the biggest thing right now.”
So perhaps you shouldn’t be worrying about whether you’re spending money on social. By doing any social media marketing you’re intrinsically paying for it as there is a big time investment. What you should be concerned with, however, is ensuring your staff are trained and your content is engaging.
