In my last blog post, I went over paid social media. Today I will dive into the other half of the social media world, organic social media! In paid social media marketing, consumers are most likely coming across your content because it is a boosted advertisement. Organic social media refers to the content that consumers come across naturally, without boosted distribution. Most businesses don’t have tons of money to spend on advertising, so it is important to understand how to grow a brand organically.

A huge part of organic social media is customer relations. While paid content may attract new users to your page, it doesn’t require any money to pay attention to what consumers are saying about your brand. A study has shown that 59% of Americans believe that social media has made it easier to get their questions answered and issues resolved. In one example, a customer tweeted a complaint to the airline Jet Blue regarding his TV being out of order during a flight. Jet Blue responded quickly, showed empathy, and offered that customer a form of credit for his trouble. Just 23 minutes after his initial complaint, that customer sent out a second tweet praising Jet Blue’s customer service. This translates to positive word of mouth, and I’d be willing to bet that customer will recommend Jet Blue to his friends in the future. While you can’t possibly plan on going viral, fast food powerhouse Wendy’s has earned tons of free press from customer relations tweets blowing up. One example includes a teen named Carter Wilkerson tweeting at Wendy’s to ask how many retweets it would take for him to earn a years worth of free chicken nuggets. Wendy’s responded with a hefty challenge of “18 million.” While that didn’t happen, Carter’s quest for nuggets did become the most shared tweet of all time, amassing over 3 million retweets. Twitter even created a custom hashtag for the cause, “#NuggsForCarter.” Not only did this social media stunt result in Carter actually getting free chicken nuggets, but Wendy’s earned over 7 million dollars in “earned media value” throughout this campaign.

Another big part of organic social media is creating a community. Building a positive community on social media often correlates with increased brand loyalty. A study showed that 53% of customers that follow brands on social media are more loyal to those brands. One creative way to get people excited about being a part of your community is promoting user generated content. Cupshe is a swimwear company that focuses heavily on user generated content as a part of its marketing strategy. When Instagram users post a picture in their Cupshe swimwear, they can tag the brand for a chance to be featured on its page. This gets more people posting pictures with your products, and the users you feature on your page are likely going to feel so important that they turn into customers for life.

Consumers are often skeptical about following brands on social media because they don’t like seeing advertisements. A great thing about social media is the ability to humanize a brand. When building a community on social media, it is often in your best interest to talk like a normal person rather than a salesperson. Many companies take advantage of humor and memes to get through to their customers in a human way. A study from Sprout revealed that 67% of consumers are willing to like entertaining social content. Moonpie is a great example of a company that uses humor to gain an online following. Take a look at these examples of Moonpie tweets that had the internet laughing.

Tracking everything happening within your community can be pretty difficult. Luckily, companies like Sprout have developed social listening tools that provide data to help manage your online presence. Sprout states that “social listening tools empower marketers to execute real-time brand monitoring and analyze social data for marketing insights.” Another cool thing about social listening tools is that you are able to track data from all of your social platforms within one piece of software. You don’t need to worry about bouncing between Twitter and Instagram, because your engagements across all platforms will be presented to you within this one powerful tool. Lets take a look at some of my favorite features included with Sprout’s software.

Smart Inbox: Sprout’s Smart Inbox allows you to manage messages across all social media platforms. You have the power to filter your inbox to show messages from certain platforms (Facebook, Instagram, etc), or even the medium of the message (mentions, direct messages, etc). This makes social media monitoring much easier, as all of your data is in one place.

Trends Report: Within the Sprout software, you can access data to trends on the internet. You can look at trending hashtags, topics, and even filter this information by demographics to see who is talking about what.

Listening: One of the most powerful tools within the Sprout software is the listening feature. Sprout will analyze large volumes of social conversations and report what people are talking about, how they feel about it, and provide locations so you can pinpoint where these trends are taking place.

This software is so beneficial because it allows you to respond to consumers efficiently with the monitoring features, and you can also see worldwide trends which help create marketing insights. Brands like Awario and Hootsuite also offer valuable social media monitoring tools. Regardless of how you choose to monitor social media, there is no denying the power in organic social media marketing. I hope you learned something about how to capitalize on building a community through organic content. Until next time!