In a world of results-driven pay-per-click, content marketing, and return on investment, it can be easy for businesses to put their Organic Social Media strategy to one side, assuming it’ll take care of itself.

But although it might not be as ‘sexy’ as its paid-for Social relatives (yes, I did just call PPC ads ‘sexy’), organic Social Media deserves your attention if you’re going to achieve your broader marketing goals.

So, let’s show it some love.

Here are the right questions to ask the agency you’re working with to make sure your organic social media accounts are flourishing.

How do you use a social media strategy to make a positive impact for clients?

An organic social media strategy likely won’t achieve all your marketing goals on its own—you’ll need a wider marketing strategy for that (and feel free to get in touch if you want to discuss developing one…).

However, our approach to organic social media ensures a better and more consistent presence. In turn, this boosts your other marketing efforts.

Here’s our process:

1. We develop a ‘bank’ of content for our clients that is evergreen (i.e. not time sensitive)
2. We then use a really useful social media scheduling tool called MeetEdgar to schedule clients’ content in advance. We love it so much we even made a video about it.
3. Every few months we refresh the scheduled content using what is in the ‘bank’
4. Alongside this, we post something timely—such as a news article—every day.

This ensures a steady stream of content on our clients’ social media accounts.

We typically set aside 10/15 minutes each morning posting timely content, and then 3/4 hours every couple of months refreshing our ‘bank’ of content.

How often should we post on social media for it to be effective?

In short: it depends. Here’s why.

For a B2C company with thousands of followers and an active customer service department, clearly the number of posts a day will be higher than a B2B start-up tech company making software for energy companies.

Equally, if your service offering is very specific and aimed at a niche audience, there will be fewer pieces of content that would be appropriate for social. For example, it wouldn’t be advisable to post the same piece of content 50 times, because your audience will get fed up with it. But if you have 25 pieces of content, it would be fine to post each of these twice.

What KPIs do you use to demonstrate success?

The overall marketing strategy KPIs we measure depends on the objectives. If a client is looking to improve brand awareness, we’d look at metrics like the number of impressions, or view time for a video, for example.

However, other interim measures can demonstrate the success of your organic social media activity:

• • Follower count—look for a steadily increasing number of followers, indicating your organic content is interesting to your audience
  • Engagement rate—are people interacting with your posts? This can take the shape of metrics such as ‘retweets’ on Twitter or ‘likes’ on LinkedIn
  • Analytics information—is the number of visitors to your website increasing? Are these visitors staying on your website to read your content, rather than leaving straight away? This indicates that visitors find your content and offering compelling.

What successes have you achieved for clients through an organic social media strategy?

We don’t like to boast too much, but since you asked, we have…

• Increased follower count by over 232%
• Improved engagement rates by over 29%
• Increased the weekly average link clicks by over 22%
• Attracted better quality website traffic (i.e. more visitors in the client’s target audience)

What happens after we launch our organic social media strategy?

One thing is for certain: don’t just post your content and never look at it again.

This is particularly important if you have an active community of followers on social media, who may be responding to your content or asking questions about it. Make sure your social channels are monitored and moderated where relevant.

In the longer term, your previous social media activity is the best indicator of how well your future posts will do. Is there a particular topic that generates lots of engagement? Do posts with images outperform those without?

As an agency, we use this information to optimize social media posts in the future—both for ourselves and for our clients.

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Although organic social media is important for business success, it won’t produce results on its own.

Instead, it should be part of a wider marketing strategy (which could include paid social, content marketing, or other elements) and can be used to supplement other marketing efforts such as promoting an event or competition. It just so happens that we can help you with that!

Get in touch with our account manager Kelly [email protected] or call +1 877 465 7740 / +44 20 7099 5535 to find out how.