Never before has it been more important to have a solid organic social strategy. Here are some reasons why.
In the last three months, the social media platform, Social Bakers has reported* that organic social content has overtaken paid content. In addition, a number of changes in the way consumers absorb social content and how brands are publishing during the pandemic has seen a number of significant changes, here are some of our key takeaways from the report.
Budgets
With marketing budgets being reallocated or squeezed, the luxury of being able to spend money to promote posts to specific audience groups with a higher propensity to engage with your content is no longer viable for many brands and businesses. Instead, time and effort have shifted to focus on developing more specific and targeted organic content to help increase the reach and relevancy of updates to get through each social platform’s algorithms.
More is more
With more time to rethink marketing strategies and assess what works and what doesn’t work, brands are spending more time developing tailored content, whether it’s a blog post, video or live update with a clear purpose, focus and objective in mind. Creating content which can be posted more regularly with increased natural value will help spark reactions, comments and shares of content with less reliance on paid promotions. Facebook in particular saw the biggest rise in the regularity and frequency of organic content from March to June 2020 as it seems brands are looking to communicate more with their followers, to keep them engaged and attract new ones to their page.
Objectives
For those who were still running ads, the biggest change reported by Social Bakers was the increase in reach as the main objective for social ads. Compared to Q4 2019, reach ads increased by over 13 percent on Facebook and almost 16 percent on Instagram. With ad spend decreasing across regions and industries, businesses who do have budget to spend have wanted their content to be seen by a larger audience, the seemingly common objective for the majority or organisations during the pandemic.
Time
With more page fans spending increased time online during the pandemic, it’s clear that across Europe, the amount of time spent on Facebook increased in March for every day of the week and every waking hour compared to months before the pandemic. The most notable difference was the higher amount of people online in the evenings, when normally they would have been out, with the peak usage time being Friday and Saturday nights.
Influencers
During second quarter of 2020, Social Bakers reported fewer social #ads from influencers as budgets have been tightened. Of course there are some brands who are still keen to invest as they rely heavily on influencer outreach to get their products in front of their customers (iDeal of Sweden moved into the top spot for brand Instagram accounts associated with influencers) but for many, they are seemingly reverting back to the original form of influencer marketing, whereby influencers were happy to receive and review products for free. It helps give them new content at a time when experiences are limited, and this shift will be welcome, perhaps not for brands but certainly consumers.
*Social Bakers Media Trends Report June 2020
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