What is the difference between organic social media and paid social media?
What each one is actually for, and why running only one of them usually stalls.
Organic social is what you post to the audience you already have. Paid social is reach you buy from people who have never heard of you. Organic earns trust after the click. Paid creates the click. They do different jobs and neither replaces the other.
What organic actually does
Organic reach for business pages is small and has been shrinking for years. Judging organic on reach misses the point. Its real job is proof. When somebody sees your ad, hears you at an event, or gets your name from a friend, a lot of them check your profile before they check your website. A profile with recent posts, real faces, finished work, and answered comments makes the next step easy. A profile whose last post is fourteen months old raises a question you do not want raised.
Organic also produces the creative and the language that paid ads use later. The post that got shared is the ad you should be running.
What paid actually does
Paid buys distribution. It puts you in front of people who would never have found you, and it does it on a timeline a business owner can live with. It is also measurable in a way organic is not: you can tie spend to leads to deals.
Why one without the other stalls
Organic alone rarely creates demand fast enough to matter. You can post consistently for a year and grow slowly, which is fine if you have a year. Paid alone sends interested people to an empty profile, and some of them stop there. It also means every lead costs money, forever, with nothing compounding.
If you can only fund one, pick by timeline. Need pipeline this quarter, run paid. Building a brand people will recommend, run organic and be patient. Most businesses that are working on both end up spending more on paid and getting better results from it, because the organic gave the ads something to land on.
LevelUp Digital prices them separately. Organic is a monthly social media retainer, paid is managed at 10 percent of ad spend with a $1,500 per month minimum. There is a practical starting point in our guide to building a social media content strategy.
Related: What social media services does LevelUp Digital offer?. Which social media platforms do you manage?. Can social media actually drive leads for B2B companies?.