Unless your brand is a household name, you will probably have noticed that your organic reach on social media, especially Facebook, has slowly been declining over the last couple of years.

Long gone are the days where small and medium sized businesses could put out a Facebook post and reach thousands of people. The reality is that social media has been becoming a “pay as you play” platform for a while now.

Why is this?

Well, Facebook (the biggest social network, with 1.7 billion monthly active users) wanted to make sure that its users weren’t logging on and being flooded with posts from brands and businesses. They wanted to retain the personal element of the platform; ensuring that the majority of posts being served to users were from their friends and family.

Many social media managers will have noticed that, although their following is increasing, they aren’t getting the reach or engagement that they used to.

The truth is that to get user attention now, you’ll likely have to pay for it.

We know it’s not easy to convince senior management that they’ll have to start paying to use a platform that everyone uses for free. Many of them just won’t see the value behind it. So we’re going to try and help you convince them…

You can target specific demographics

Based on a number of criteria (users’ interests, age, gender and location to name a few), you can make sure that your content is delivered to people more relevant for your business needs.

Provided that you research your audience, and have clear business goals in mind, this is a great way to ensure that your content is reaching the people that you need it to.

Your content is being delivered to a new audience

The likelihood is that there are thousands of social media users out there who will have an interest in your brand; they just don’t know it yet. By serving your content to a targeted audience, you will be able to catch the attention of new users and hopefully retain them as fans of your company.

A recent update to Facebook means that any new users that ‘react’ to one of your posts can now be invited to like your page.

This is a great way to build your audience, whilst ensuring that these new fans take an active interest in your content. What this also means is that any organic content (not paid-for) that you post in the future is now being served to a more relevant audience. This should result in greater organic reach.

It shouldn’t cost too much!

Possibly the greatest argument you can put to the powers-that-be is that, if you do it right, paid social shouldn’t be costing you that much.

Obviously this is dependent on a number of factors (type of content, industry, business goals), but we have seen great results on paid-for social content using just a small percentage of many businesses monthly marketing spend.

For example, we recently produced a video for one of our clients that we put some budget behind to push on Facebook. The end result was thousands of views at a cost of just £0.002 per view. And because of the detailed targeting offered across social media platforms, it meant that the video was viewed by those most relevant to our client. That’s pretty much priceless.

We aren’t saying that you should put money behind every one of your social media posts; that’s not the way to do it. Our advice would be to put aside some budget each month for paid social media, and then use this to work towards your business goals. A little bit of paid social each month will lead to:

• A bigger, more relevant audience
• The opportunity to serve your organic content to that bigger and more relevant audience
• Your brand staying relevant amongst those who have an interest in it

If you’re in the automotive industry and want to improve your social media presence why not get in touch with Red Marlin to see what we could do for you?