Is organic social dead?

Earlier in my career, I was told by the Head of Acquisition that organic social media reach is dead.

"Paid social does much better, isn't that a known thing?'' he said with supreme confidence. Ahh the age-old paid vs organic debate, I had been here before, but for some reason it still provoked feelings of anxiety. Am I a fraud? Had my success growing organic channels been a long timeline of fluke? ''JUST AT LOOK WHAT MICHAEL CORCORAN IS DOING WITH RYANAIR, BRO'' was a typical rebuttal of mine. Mike did wonderful things for the industry and still is an organic king, but I couldn't keep using his success at a low budget airline as my organic-social-media-crutch. Not cool.

What I should have told him was that real organic social media is only dead for those who just want sell on social media. You must understand that here, you are not in competition for who offers the best product or services—it's about mind-equity—and that's not something that comes naturally, especially when your product is B2B or has a negative stigma that follows it around. Just the mere fact that a brand is known brings more value to the products that are sold under its name. I'm not very impressionable and I rarely buy anything via social media, but when I do need a product or a service, I often find that it's the brands I have seen using social media come to mind first because I am able to recall their posts, or how they recently went viral for jumping on a trending meme the week before, tactfully crafted and tied back to their brand or product in some creative way. We've been doing this for a long time for brands in the casino industry who inherently struggle on social media. They struggle because their main offering is not particularly trendy... people lose cash whilst gambling, right?

Last year a mostly unheard of UK based sportsbook approached us with the goal of acquiring more users to bet on football games. They had set aside a budget for a paid social effort which would push those not-so-cool but proven cash-cow 'click here to bet with us' ads that you've all seen before, but it was our job was to create the organic counter-balance to compliment that.

So, we fired up a Twitter (X) channel, linked it back to their main betting channel and started to churn out organic football content that we cooked up in-house. We paired that with a bit of a laddish football fan tonality that we knew would resonate with our target audience and covered the most important happenings in football. We knocked up some very spicy memes that may or may not have caught the attention of The Sun Newspaper, and we remained consistent. Lo and behold, over the course of the year we had amassed an organic following of 85,000 football fans, 70% based in the UK. Our engagement was through the roof and on top of that, we had started generating 50+ new first-time depositors each month without ever twisting anyone's arm to sign up or place a bet. Wild stuff.

The majority of brands have an easy time with paid social media but a much harder time with organic.

Organic social goes hand-in-hand with paid. Paid gets in front of your consumer quickly, whilst organic is there to seal the deal. Too much paid can be damaging if you’re trying to build a reputable online presence. Give a little back, put some time and effort into a real strategy. Hire a specialised agency or hire in-house if you can, and do your best to find the overlap between what your brand wants to say and what your audience wants to hear. Awareness eventually turns into acquisition.