6 reasons to invest in organic reach on social media

This article originally appeared on PR Daily in February of 2018.

Of late, engaging in organic or unpaid social media marketing has gotten a bad rap.

As Marshall Manson, the CEO of Ogilvy UK, recently put it in an eMarketer report: “You might as well take your [organic social media] budget to the bank, cash it out in greenback $20s, pile it up in the parking lot and light the money on fire.”

While that take may be particularly harsh, it fits with the belief held by a number of experts that brand managers should abandon their unpaid efforts and engage only in paid advertising on social.

There are good reasons for this opinion. Over the past decade, social networks have increasingly moved from being open places where brands have unfettered access to audiences, to closed platforms that often require payment to get content in front of viewers.

Though this shift to a pay-to-play model is indisputable and continuing, it does not mean that brands should only use social networks for advertising.