WHEN A SEARCH ENGINE returns search results it presents two kinds: organic and paid. The former means the search listings have not been paid for and the latter, of course, indicates they have.
Social media platforms work in a similar way. Facebook for example labels paid posts as “sponsored” while Twitter marks paid tweets as “promoted”.
Launching paid campaigns on search or social can be a valuable exercise, the extent of their effectiveness determined by the amount of money spent. But as soon as you stop paying, you stop getting results.
Why organic is better
Organic results are harder to achieve – and much more valuable for your business.
A range of studies (such as this survey) have found that users on search engines overwhelmingly click on organic results over paid results, sometimes by a margin of up to 94 percent to 6 percent.
Users on social media are also much more likely to engage with organic content over paid content.
Whenever we see paid content we think: it’s just there because it’s been paid for! But our response to organic content is different. We think: this content has value.
Syl Freedman (pictured above) achieves terrific organic results on her EndoActive Facebook page. One of her recent posts was seen by over 28,000 people.
Long-term benefits
Paid content stops being seen as soon as you stop paying for it.
However if your content has been seen organically, it means the search engine or social media platform perceive that content to be valuable – so it will stay there for a much longer time.
Anybody can pay companies like Facebook or Google to get their content in front of people. Not everybody can implement great cost-effective strategies, that disseminates highly engaging content to deliver both long term and short term benefits.
GET IN TOUCH! At Search and Social Sydney, we achieve great things for Australian businesses on social media and search engines. Our team is based in Sydney and offer affordable, highly effective services for organisations of any size. Learn more about who we are and what we do.
