How to Use Organic Social Media Marketing to Grow Your Business in 2024
Social media has become an integral part of people's lives and daily routines. Some are addicted to it so much that the first thing they do after waking up is to check their social media feeds.
Social media usage is on the rise and steadily growing. With over 4.74 billion active users, which is a boost of 4.2% compared to the number of users reported the previous year. That means 59.3% of the world’s population is active on social media.
Given the importance of social media in consumers' lives, marketers and businesses flock to social platforms in the hope of connecting with their target customers. However, there is a content overload on social media, and the competition is very high. It can be challenging for you to stand out unless you have a clear social media marketing strategy.
As we stand here in 2024, the social media landscape is experiencing a monumental transformation. The rapid advancement of technology stemming from ever-evolving online user behavior is driving social media platforms to innovate and adapt at an extraordinary pace. This era of transformation brings with it new challenges and exciting opportunities, particularly for growing businesses looking to capitalize on the ability to proliferate a message about a company's unique differentiating factors that social media provides.
In this article, we will focus on how growing businesses ought to go about really prioritizing the development of a strong organic social media strategy in 2024. While we are not suggesting that paid social media does not have a place within your business’ growth marketing process, as part of the overall analysis we will put forward the view that organic social media strategy is paramount to establishing the core messages that your business is trying to get across to potential customers, while paid social media can help to accelerate or scale a message that has proven to resonate.
Organic social media vs. paid social media:
Before we dive into creating an organic social media strategy in 2024, we want to emphasize that a holistic approach to social media marketing requires both organic and paid strategies.
Organic social media and paid social media are both great tools or channels, aligned for notably different purposes. Your business will need to use both organic and paid social media to achieve your brand’s goals.
You will need to use organic social media when you want to:
Nurture your connection with your existing customers or audience
Tell your brand story
Establish your brand’s credibility
Offer customer service support to your existing customers
On the other hand, you will need to leverage paid social media when you want to:
Retarget social media users who engaged with your posts or page
Push a target audience to become leads and convert
Reach new audience or lookalikes of your existing customers and followers
Boost a highly engaging or shareable organic post
In a nutshell, organic social media marketing is about establishing your brand's voice and establishing early adopters and customer advocates for your business. Essentially, what organic social media sets to do is establish credibility, advocacy, and social proof for your growing (hopefully constantly growing) business. Paid social media marketing in a broad sense, works to amplify the validity and benefit of your business to a wider audience in a variety of ways.
This article, however, will focus on the benefits of pursuing an organic social media marketing strategy in 2024, the benefits of doing so, some trends to look out for, as well as the elements of an organic social media strategy that your growing business should not overlook.
What is organic social media and where does it fit into the overall growth marketing process?
Organic social media refers to the free content (posts, photos, videos, memes, Stories, etc.) that all users, including businesses and brands, share on their feeds.
As a brand, when you post organically to your account, you can expect that the people who will see it are:
A percentage of your followers (a.k.a. your ‘organic reach’)
Your followers’ followers (if people choose to share your post)
People following any hashtags you use
It sounds pretty simple, but the reason that organic social media is the foundation of every digital marketing strategy today is that it’s the most authentic (and as a result, the best way) to nurture a connection with your customers at scale.
But of course, there is a downside to organic social media in terms of reach (certainly as compared to paid social media). The reality is that because all the major platforms use ranking algorithms, only a small percentage of your followers will see your organic posts.
As an example, the average organic reach for a Facebook post is about 5.5% of a page’s follower count
Declining organic reach has been a fact of life for a few years now, as the world’s biggest social media platforms reach saturation, attention spans shorten, and platform CEOs prioritize “meaningful” or “responsible” user experiences. In other words: it’s harder than ever to get your brand’s content seen by your audience, let alone new eyes.
That is where paid social media comes into play to extend its reach, as alluded to earlier.
However, organic social media is the foundation that allows your paid posts to make a more notable impact than they otherwise may.
9 Organic Social Media Trends to Focus on in 2024 To Incorporate Within a Proper Growth Marketing Framework
Now that we have established the true value proposition of organic social media for growth-focused businesses like yours, let us now take some time here to examine the various factors and existing tendencies that businesses need to leverage to create an organic social media strategy that is truly impactful.
1. Authenticity is the key
Apart from video content appearing on the social media trends list for the last couple of years, authenticity has slowly become the determining factor of success for social media platforms. In the time of overly-edited images and videos and customer cynicism, authenticity, posts in real-time, and posts that customers can relate to are more of a demand than an expectation.
The popularity of TikTok and the BeReal platform demonstrates precisely that. The need for relatively unvarnished content that features real relatable situations and personalities.
2. Short video & TikTok content will become more prevalent
Concerning video content, naturally, YouTube remains the leader in that area. Especially so, for 92% of marketers that tend to view it as a vital part of their marketing strategy. The video momentum has only increased as major social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn improve their video capabilities to catch up with the growing popularity and new trends.
But TikTok has also spurred another interesting trend. Short-form videos have become something of a popular phenomenon with younger audiences. According to a study, TikTok currently boasts 1.4 billion monthly active users and will reach 1.8 billion by the end of 2023. The reason why short engaging videos are so widespread are becoming increasingly popular stems from the fact that they are easy to create and fairly inexpensive, which can result in some great (and to the previous point, authentic) user-generated content.
Instagram took a step towards the shorter video format and introduced it to its platform as Instagram Reels. Even though their key demographic differs, this type of video “microcontent” has seen a boost in popularity with them as well. The frank reality is that the attention span continues to shrink with every generation, so expect this to be a trend that sticks. Influencers have been able to use these short videos to promote partner products and services to their audiences.
3. Micro-influencers will become more effective
Speaking of influencer marketing, this trend is going to be even more important this year. As more and more rely on social proliferation to affect their shopping choices, your brand promotion strategy will be defined by partnering with influencers to their audience. Although influencer marketing is an effective social marketing strategy, it can be costly.
As macro influencers have huge followings, they have difficulties engaging with their followers. Micro-influencers, on the other hand, have smaller audiences but a higher engagement rate. Plus, they are less prohibitively expensive to partner with. Collaborating with several smaller influencers that are more suited for your relevant market can have a better return on investment for your business.
4. Social commerce on the rise
Speaking of social proliferation, modern buyers are more informed than ever before. They are researching your brand and offering thoroughly. That’s why this approach to commerce has great potential. Convenience is important for potential customers. That means finding information about you and your offering in one place. 54% use social media to research products. How your brand is represented, including customer interaction and reviews helps them to make an informed decision and purchase quicker.
That’s what Facebook and Instagram had in mind anyway. They were the first platforms to offer social commerce options. With the gradual switch to online shopping and the new wave of active users pouring in, it seems that they were on to something. So you can be sure that the Facebook Shop and Instagram Storefront will become one of the most used features on their respective platforms if they are not already.
Another important thing to consider is the fact that this trend is sure to grow as other social channels start to experiment with similar features and ways to offer businesses new sales venues.
5. Social listening & brand involvement
Your business must know what’s trending within the wider population. Follow the conversation so you can pitch in and actively engage with what your audience is talking about.
Social listening can be used in many different ways. For example, when someone mentions your brand you want to be there, especially if a customer has a problem or a question. A quick and helpful reply does more for your brand image than ads ever could. But it’s not just about being reactive. Your business also needs to use social listening proactively by getting ahead of developing topic trends and seeing how people react to them.
Social listening also helps in competitor analysis. Monitor competing businesses in your market to see how they are interacting with their audience. What they are doing right and what you can do better in your social approach. Find out on which social channels they are most active. All of this provides your business with the ability help to discover new opportunities and audiences for your brand.
6. Tight-knit communities
One phenomenon that is increasingly being seen within different channels is the proliferation of smaller communities with like-minded people where they can create and share content more freely. These micro-communities have smaller audiences but high engagement rates.
Facebook Groups saw a rise in the number of groups which coincides almost perfectly with the current situation the world is facing, as people are socially orientated with an inclination to interact with others. Companies have also taken notice of this trend on social media and are increasingly becoming interested in building up sub-segments of their existing communities.
You can use this to your advantage by simply drawing your audience around a focal point that can be anything from your brand or a specific product. Gather feedback, offer valuable content, gain valuable insights, drive the conversation with your audience, and increase the credibility of your brand.
7. Connecting social media and email marketing
A great way to combine both of these powerful channels is to use them for different purposes. Social media platforms are great for building brand awareness and audience interest while email marketing focuses on conversion. A cross-channel campaign like a giveaway on social in return for a subscription to your email newsletter is a good start.
You can do it in reverse too, by uploading a segmented email list on social media to better connect with your users and find new ones. Facebook Custom and Lookalike Audiences can help you out. This, in turn, can also benefit your ad retargeting campaigns as well.
8. Augmented reality
Essentially, AR enhances real-life visual content and alters how it looks to make it stand out on social media. It’s a very popular feature, especially with younger audiences. But augmented reality as a rising trend on social media doesn’t stop with the fluffy bunny ears or cool sunglasses.
With AR, Facebook and Instagram have improved the social shopping experiences for their users. Although as of yet only several types of products are supported, augmented reality has exponential that is increasingly being oriented towards finding ways to commercialize it.
Since everyone has a smartphone and with the rise of social commerce that we alluded to earlier, this trend is fully expected to grow. Marketers have taken note of the growing popularity of AR and are starting to implement it in their social outreach campaigns.
9. Virtual reality
The movement towards virtual reality isn’t as fast-moving as augmented reality. Nevertheless, user adoption is slow but steady. Given its ability to provide a fully immersive interaction, it is only inevitable that virtual reality will be increasingly used by brands as a way of augmenting the social presence and experience that their business can provide its customers.
While the current focus of VR is on virtual reality gaming, it’s safe to say in the future it won’t stop there. YouTube is also already experimenting with virtual reality, offering different experiences like watching concerts, doing sports activities, and going on virtual safari tours.
The above barely scratches the surface of the virtual reality platform. As the audience for VR grows and more people start using it, eventually, businesses will follow. Imagine showcasing your product in 3D, which sets a new bar for shopping experiences, whether you are buying a car by doing a virtual test drive, or looking for a new apartment and trying to envision how your furniture will fit in.
13 Ways to Establish Effective Growth Marketing Fundamentals With an Effective Organic Social Media Strategy in 2024
We have so far established the benefit of prioritizing organic social media to the point and not ignoring it totally in favor of paid social media. Moreover, since we are now cognizant of some key trends to look out for in social media in 2024, let us set up some ground rules for effectively leveraging organic social media strategy in 2024.
1. Identify the social media platforms to focus on
Before you can launch your organic social media strategy, you must choose the right platform for you. Mind you, this tip also applies to your paid social media strategy. Identify the best social media platform for your brand by looking at where your target audience spends their time. Your audience could be anywhere from more obscure platforms like Lemon8 to trending ones such as TikTok.
Look at each social media platform’s user demographics and match that with your customers. Is your business interested in reaching more U.S. adults aged 18 to 29? Consider Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. According to Pew Research Center data, 71% of U.S. adults aged 18 to 29 use Instagram, 65% are on Snapchat, and 48% use TikTok.
Reach out via email to do a quick survey among your existing customers. Take this opportunity to thank them for being loyal customers and ask what social media platforms they frequently use.
Monitoring your competitors’ organic social media presence and activity can also give you an idea as to where your customers and prospects frequent most. Once you’ve identified the social media platforms where they are, you can decide where to pour your efforts into.
2) Join groups and communities relevant to your brand
Social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have groups, which are interest- or niche-based online communities. Members can create posts, ask questions, and reply to other users’ posts.
Groups are excellent avenues for you to get a pulse of your target audience. Use it as a social listening tool to understand what your prospects are interested in or what their main pain points are. From there, you can casually find ways to propose what your business offers as a solution to what they are looking for.
3) Measure and monitor your organic social media posts’ performance monthly
Finally, don’t forget to evaluate your organic social media posts’ performance. Know the right metrics such as comments, mentions, shares, etc to track and aim to gradually use the feedback to improve and adapt the tactics that you use.
Which topics were your audience interested in? What type of content did they consume more of? Which social media posts led the most number of visitors to your website? These are all things that you need to consider as you monitor your social media posts and decide how to adapt them over time.
4) Monitor Mentions, Comments, and Conversations
As an extension of the previous point, it is important to monitor the relevant conversations happening on different social channels (both yours and those related to your business) about your brand, products, or services. The work doesn’t end once you hit “post.” Constantly monitoring your metrics by directly surveying social conversations, comments, and mentions allows you to be increasingly attuned to what your customers and prospects are looking for.
This real-time feedback lets you keep a pulse on your fans’ needs and evolving perceptions.
5) Post Evergreen Content
Evergreen content, as a marketing strategy, serves multiple purposes and offers long-term ROI and value. With this type of content, there’s a real chance to grow the client base, lower high marketing costs, and provide better campaign turnouts all in one fell swoop.
The idea with evergreen content is that it stays relevant for a long period, if not timeless. The reason is this content not only can be revisited at different points but can also be approached from different angles or repurposed for different formats (ex; blog posts, social media posts, videos, how-to guides, etc.)
The reality is that more than four million blog posts go live every single day. That’s just talking about blogs. You don’t even want to start contemplating total online content including emails, landing pages, product pages, podcasts, and social media. Standing out in this mountain of content is harder than ever.
That is where evergreen content, due to its timeless nature, can help you cut through the noise.
They can help your audience find tons of information on a subject or a problem or situation or topic.
This helps credibility to your social media channels, but to your business overall. Knowing what content and what format works best is specific to your audience, but hitting on the right content angles will help provide your evergreen content with the credibility it needs to connect and resonate with your audience that will help to drive traffic and potential sales and leads.
Which leads to the next point:
6) Publish Content that Does Not Have An Expiration Date
What this typically involves is posting on ways of solving common and persistent problems in your industry. It is very much connected to the previous point about evergreen content, but it does not even have to be theme-based as is the case with evergreen content
As an example, humorous content (especially if it is current and contextual) can help you make a connection with your audience.
After all, people will always share positive posts more than negative ones.
7) Post during slow hours
Another misconception is that you should post when everyone is online, but that’s just going to throw your content into the massive storm of posts that people are bound to see. If you wait until non-peak hours to post, you’re less likely to get drowned in all the noise.
Generally the best times for posting on social media:
Facebook – (Thursdays/Fridays) between 1pm and 3pm
X (Twitter) – (weekdays) between 12pm and 6pm
LinkedIn – (Tuesday – Thursday) between 7am/8am and 5pm/6pm
That being said, you should always be mindful of your own audience, and the data as it pertains to them..
8. Post the right types of content
An interesting study done by Socialbakers revealed that certain types of content can give you a huge boost in organic reach.
The results of their study showed that videos had the highest organic reach on Facebook by a margin of almost 3%, which is huge given that the average organic social media reach has dropped to 1% or less.
You shouldn’t automatically assume that videos will work for you as well, but it should make you want to experiment with it.
Not only should you vary up the mix of images, status updates, links, and videos that you post, but also use tools like Facebook Insights to track your posts and see which types are performing best.
9. Use an 80/20 approach of promotional vs useful content:
Instinctively, it is only natural for a business to want to promote its product or service on social media. But doing so too much can cause your prospective audience to tune you out.
Users are not conditioned to expect to find content that’s useful to them while allowing your business to promote its products and services.
Moreover, sharing valuable content (how-to guides, articles, new posts, etc.) allows you to grow a user’s trust in your brand. It will allow you to increasingly portray yourself as an authority/thought leader/expert in the industry. This in turn can lead them to recommend a product or service that you offer.
The idea here is to master the 80/20 balance. 80% will bring new followers and build trust. The other 20% will help you close sales or generate leads.
10. Post short-form videos
Consider how YouTube, Instagram Reels, or TikToks becoming increasingly popular and have proven increasingly helpful at boosting social media follower growth. Why? Simply because its digestible and sharable nature allows people to share and absorb these videos very easily.
Moreover, these short-form videos are geared towards being found quickly. Instagram specifically says that for Reels, “the majority of what you see is from accounts you don’t follow.” Likewise, Facebook describes Reels as, “content you may be interested in from creators you may not follow.” TikTok is designed to surface content a user will find interesting, not just content from accounts they follow.
Your short video content needs to align with your overall social strategy and your brand voice. But, it’s a completely different kind of content than you’re creating for feed posts, stories, or regular video channel content.
11. Embrace Social SEO
Social SEO is all about optimizing your content using SEO tactics like keyword research, captions, and effective alt text to help the search features built into each social platform understand what your content is about.
That means people who are actively searching for content like yours are more likely to find you
Moreover, as an additional bonus: Social media search results are indexed by search engines like Google. What this means is that you can drive new eyeballs to your social content from people who are starting their search from within organic search engines.
12) Use remarketing ads to stay connected to your organic audience
Remarketing campaigns can be highly effective at a relatively low cost since you’re reaching back out to people who already know your business. This is true not just for those businesses that have visited your website, but also just as much for those that have visited your social media channels.
The idea here is that they may just need a reminder to come back and convert, and the right ad (with the right message, or focused on the right content) might just be able to convince them.
13) Measure and monitor your social media performance:
Don’t forget to evaluate your organic social media posts’ performance. Know the right metrics to track and aim to have a better organic social media strategy the following month!
The key here is to find the metrics that align with your goals and sub-goals: followers, engagements, impressions, post-click-through rates, etc. That being said don’t just set it and forget it. Keep assessing whether your selected metrics are providing actionable insights. If not, switch them up.
Public engagement metrics such as comments, shares, and likes help gauge what resonates with your target audience, most notably what causes them to reach.
Which topics were your audience interested in? What type of content did they consume more of? Which social media posts led the most number of visitors to your website?
By evaluating your organic social media strategy’s monthly performance, you’ll find out which topics resonate well with your audience. You’ll also discover your customers’ concerns, pain points, and attitudes toward your brand. These insights can help you plan your next organic social media content calendar and let you know more about your customers.
It’s Extremely Important to Incorporate Organic Social Media Marketing into the Growth Marketing Framework of Your Business in 2024
While paid social media marketing gets more attention, organic social media is still a valuable tool to help you nurture relationships with prospective customers.
With the tips and strategies outlined in this guide, you are all on your way.
If you’re struggling with your organic social media strategy and execution in 2024, one of the best ways to get a head start is to access the support of a specialist. Our social media specialists will analyze your website and provide tailored tactics coupled with a systematic approach to help you reach your goals.
Whether specific to organic social media marketing or your marketing efforts as a whole, growth marketing consulting that is available on demand to serve as an outside source that can evaluate your overall strategy, as well as specific campaigns and tactics, and give you specific recommendations (as well as work to implement them) to help achieve growth is an asset that few businesses take advantage of.
That being said, as we have tried to emphasize in this article, organic social media marketing can be a major driver for growth in your business. That‘s why you ought to reach out to our growth marketing experts for a free initial consultation.