Gone are the days of growing a Facebook or Instagram audience organically.
Why? Because Facebook is a for profit company that makes its money from advertising. Facebook’s shareholders expect a return on their investment, and advertising is the way Facebook delivers.
So, Facebook has made growing and reaching your audience a challenge if you don’t pay for advertising. It’s that simple.
Let’s talk about what this means for brands. I’ve seen small businesses that are reticent to put ad dollars toward growing their own social media presence. But then they spend a huge number of man hours on creating great content and social media posts.
The problem? Few people see the fruit of this labor because the brands don’t promote it with ads. When you assess the effort involved to create those posts vs. the return for one ad campaign, paid social media is more cost effective.
While on the B2B side LinkedIn is more expensive than Facebook, you can make a similar argument. While you’re paying significantly more per click on LinkedIn than Facebook, you can target prospects by industry, job title, geography, company, and more. The ability to target decision makers means LinkedIn advertising provides immense value. If you just post your post to your company page, your reach is going to be much lower.
This is not to say that you can run a campaign on a social media platform with bad content, boring images, and subpar copy and have success. Give the same attention to the quality of the content. The point is that when you put a budget behind it, the content goes much further in terms of brand awareness, engagement, traffic, and even leads.
