Rev & Reach Episode 7 Transcript

00:08
LORI: Hello, everybody. I’m Lori Jo Vest. Welcome to this episode of Rev and Reach from PopSpeed Digital Marketing. I’m Lori Jo Vest, and I’m here with Kiley Metcalfe. I am the founding partner of PopSpeed Digital, and Kiley was our first employee. We do social media, all kinds of digital marketing, websites, email marketing, etc., and we are here to share our secrets. How do we get ROI from our efforts for our clients? There’s always something new to talk about, so we’re doing this every week to help you create and get better results from your efforts.

Today, we’re all about organic content. It’s just such a weird thing these days. For those of us who’ve been in social media for 16 or 17 years, organic content used to rule. I mean, Kiley, we would put things out on Facebook, and we would get so many views, and it was basically a free-for-all. You would target different people, and you could target, actually, with your organic posts. You could target a state, you could target audiences.

KILEY: Oh my gosh, I didn’t know that.

LORI: Yeah! And it didn’t cost anything. Over the past, I don’t know, I’d say maybe 10 years, maybe 8 years, all of the channels have decided that if you want to get reach, you’re either gonna need some type of hook that really gets people going and go viral, which is very rare and can never be predicted or expected.

If someone ever says, “Make this go viral,” slap ‘em! It’s not something you can do. We can never guarantee virality. But organic content these days has a much different purpose and a significantly lower reach. So, Kiley, what have you seen?

02:15
KILEY: I think it’s funny because a lot of the time you’ll hear us say that organic content is dead. It’s not dead in the sense that it doesn’t have a place in your content mix. It’s dead in the sense that if you solely rely on organic content, you’re not going to see ROI. So now, in contrast to what it used to be that Lori took us through, organic content is not filler content, but in a way, it is. It should still have an important purpose, it should still send an important message, and it should still be very intentional.

But the point of organic content is to give something for your audience members to see and to look at, and a place to learn more about you once they get there by seeing your promoted content. It’s for those people that see your ads and really want to dive deeper and continue to get to know you better.

03:13
LORI: And I do think, too, depends on the channel, depends on the client. There’s so many variables. And, one example, we have a client, a global client, that targets automotive engineers. And once in a while, we’ll put something up that has, you know it’s always a leader’s face or people at a trade show—it’s always smiling faces. It might get, you know, 700 to 1,000 views. That’s amazing. That’s a great example of organic content getting some nice views. However, the vast majority of the organic content that we share gets 140 to 200 views. While that sounds really disappointing, and yeah it can be, it also gives your people that are new to you, a place to land.

So you’ll see in some of the analytics that we share that there is an analytic called profile views, and that’s when someone sees one of your social posts, goes, “Huh? Who are these people?” and they go to your profile page. And that gives them the opportunity to go through and see all the things that you want them to know about that you have posted about on your page.

However, promoting your key content in one of two ways is critical. Either you take one or two posts a month that are really solid and serve your goals and push those with a lot of money, or you can put a little bit of money on several different posts. That will get all of yours views. All of your engagement. Because what happens too when you promote, you can promote to specific demographics and interests. So you will get higher engagement than you do on just standard organic in most cases. I know sometimes, Kiley, we’ll use organic results to choose the ad that we run. Can you talk a little bit about that?

05:14
KILEY: Absolutely. With a handful of our clients, when there’s not something really timely going on, like if we’re not, you know for our nonprofit clients we don’t have an active fundraiser or we’re not looking for current volunteers or donors or whatever the case may be, what we do then, is really look at what’s performing best organically. That’s a good indicator that people are interested, and that organic engagement is an important signal that more people might be interested beyond who already follows us and engages with us. So that content, paying attention to your analytics in that sense and what’s working organically, is a great benchmark for where to start when you’re choosing promotions.

Whether for our nonprofits, if it’s resources pertaining to the cause that they fundraise for, and spreading the word more about that. And in turn, that gets more people to their website, assuming the ad is successful, and builds their audience. So it’s really a win-win because you’re giving something to your audience and people beyond your currently active audience, and potentially getting those new audience members in return.

And the same goes, really, for any industry, right? We’ll probably, every episode, go back to our dental clients for at least some reason or another. Let’s say, you know, our calendar is full, right? What a great problem to have, but we’re not actively looking to fill slots for free consultations in the month of June. What we might do is promote 101 content about dental hygiene. If we’re engaging enough, and it looks like people are really interested in the random tips that we’re putting out, we’ll promote that to a larger audience, and continue during those slow times when it comes to promoted ads, to build our audience for when we really are looking to fill our books up once again.

And I think that—Lori you said something earlier about how your organic content is like your landing base, like where you want the audience members to land—I think a really important thing to consider, particularly for people starting their social effort from scratch, something that we’ll say anytime we’re building a brand new audience for a client, is we can’t do promotions until you have that base, right?

It’s funny, because we’ve worked with people in the past who are like, “Oh, well, we just started posting. We have two posts on our Instagram. Why are we not promoting yet?” Well, because, why don’t we backlog the page a little bit so- because at that point, the most important thing to do is build up your following, right? So why don’t we build up your page, beef it up a bit with content that kind of explains who you are, what the goals are, what you want the audience to take from the continued effort that we’re going to keep working towards, and then start promoting so they really have the chance to get to know more about you, the brand, the organization, whatever the case may be, and then make more informed decisions, right? Because you want to make it as easy as possible for the consumer. So if they don’t have to leave the platform to learn more, don’t make them. So that organic content? Yeah, it’s really for those audience members that want to learn more but don’t want to work that hard to do it.

09:01
LORI: Now, there is an exception to every rule, right?

KILEY: Yes.

LORI: So let’s talk about the exceptions! The exceptions that I’m noticing lately are specifically related to Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. Instagram Reels, when you’re doing organic content, if you put stories or reels out, you will get a significant amount of people that are not your followers as viewers of that content. So if you have the opportunity to put up shorter clips, video clips, and put them into those streams, the YouTube Shorts, or the stories and reels on Instagram, those, if they’re good enough, strong enough, appealing enough, can really shoot up your organic views and engagement. But again, you’ve got to have strong content. You’ve got to have things that are going to really engage the typical audience on those channels in order to push up those views. Because what pushes up views is likes, follows, you know, all the things, all the engagement that people have with your content. That is what tells the big bad algorithm to show your content to more people. So don’t put up boring content, and your organic content will get more reach. I mean, that’s just kind of a fact of life, right?

10:28
KILEY: I think that’s such a misconception too. It’s important to not get lazy with your organic content, and it’s really easy to do as promoted content, paid content, continues to grow and grow and grow, and how necessary it is for building a following, increasing reach, engagement, all of the things. It can get really easy to overlook what it is you’re pushing out organically. And we get that because it’s not going to be necessarily shown to potentially hundreds of thousands of people with money behind it. But again, it goes back to that it’s kind of the foundation of your page and your image. You want people to be interested, and you want to entice people, once they land on your page, to follow you, continue to learn more, interact, maybe comment, share it to somebody that they know that might be more interested in it.

By not being intentional and very, very thoughtful with your organic content, you lose out on that, right? So you could have a great ad that takes somebody to a page that’s kind of clouded with boring or unnecessary or lazy-looking imagery and other content, and then the ad loses all of its spark. So you got the click to the page, great. What did they do when they get there? And that’s where ROI really comes from. So as tempting as it might be to put a ton of extra thought into your ads and a lot less thought into your organic content, it’s a balance, and it’s a really important balance, because, of course, you know, your best content is more than likely going to be your ads, right? What’s most engaging, what’s most important for new people to know about you, but you want to maintain that brand image and kind of harness that loyalty from the new audience members by making it obvious that you know you care about what they think of your brand and your page. Because if you don’t, why should they? Right?

LORI: Exactly, exactly. And the thing is, too, a lot of the like campaigns that we run, and a like campaign is when you are using that ad to push people to like your page, to follow you, and those people end up on your page. So you want to make sure you don’t look like you just got there, right? We just showed up. We have one post, and it’s the post we used to entice you to go here. You want to have a solid base of good, strong content. Because that’s what leads them to hit that like button, which then puts your content, your organic content, in their feed, or is more likely to do so.

I have to say LinkedIn is a lot less algorithm-driven. There are things that you can do to help get your organic content from LinkedIn into people’s streams, like setting up arrangements with your employees where they go in and share the content from the page. And I’ve seen a company do this really well recently, called Anderson Material Handling, and what they’ve done is they’ve got the salespeople going in and sharing Tech Tuesday, so they go in and share a selfie with the text so it appreciates, gives the employee some appreciation, and it shows humanity of the company, and it really grows their organic reach on those posts. So there are things you can do on LinkedIn that are a lot easier than the other channels, right?

14:14
KILEY: I think another thing on LinkedIn too that’s really fun and it matters on other channels, but not as much on LinkedIn, from what we’ve seen, is comments. By getting, like, a lot of comments in your LinkedIn content, it can really start to push it out to more people, because then, you know, if I comment on Lori’s post on LinkedIn, a lot of people that I’m connected with then on LinkedIn will see Lori’s post because they’re connected to me, and I commented on it.

And a really good example of that is a relatively new client to us. They are a young professionals networking group that’s kind of a sub-branch of a larger networking organization specific to certain industries. Pretty quickly after we launched that effort, you know, you hear about that and think like, you know, it might take a bit of time to grow something like that. We pretty quickly built a bit of a following on LinkedIn, simply because the people that we work with were really engaged. When we told them, you know, if we want to build this up quickly, go ahead and comment, tag other people that show up to your events, get senior leadership and board members of the overarching organization to comment, to show it to their networks, and it worked. And they’re still engaged, and they stay commenting, and you get, you know, bigger names in the industry, sharing our stuff.

It’s been really cool to see that because we’re not really heavily doing much besides organic content for them, and so to watch their following, because, in my opinion—Lori, let me know if you agree—I think one of the hardest things on social to do is grow an audience from scratch, create a brand new page, it’s and create a brand new following, kind of out of thin air. And you know, we’re continuing to grow, of course, you know, you never want to stop that growth, but in just a couple of months, by indicating to them the importance of commenting and sharing the content, we’ve built a pretty quick and fast and engaged audience over there.

16:24
LORI: Absolutely. Yeah, that is a really interesting client because it’s difficult to find the content that’s just perfect for them. That gets the attention of the people either trying to get into the industry, or the young people that are in it now that they want to retain because, just like most industries, you’ve got to draw the young employees to keep the industry healthy, right? It’s not easy, but social—it’s another thing that social media can help with. It’s working. So, yeah, so you want to do that when you can. So anything else we want to say about organic content?

17:01
KILEY: I think it might be pretty important to talk about why you can’t only rely on organic content. You know, we’ve talked about how significant ads are, but I think, going back to that follower growth and when you have a specific thing that you need results for, how important those ads are. So, organic content, how do we feel about it? What are we seeing? We’re seeing that building that landing base, that foundation for your page, is really important. But we’re also seeing that it can’t be the only source of content that you run if you want to increase your follower count, if you are a nonprofit and you need a fundraiser, organizers, or attendees, or donors, or volunteers, or if you are a dental practice and you need qualified leads. Relying on organic content isn’t going to get you there. It’s just not. It’s going to get put out to a lot of your current followers, which, depending on your industry, most often, is people that have kind of already gotten what they need from you, right? So you’re not reaching anybody new.

18:09
LORI: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it also has a halo effect on the rest of your content, when you’re paying for ad spend. And I’ll even go as far as to say this, if you are an advertiser on Facebook, you can actually get them on the phone. We had a client that—they do everything organic, and I’m sure they get some results, but we handle the offices that don’t do organic. So we do two of their brands, we do social media for them, and they got locked out of their main Facebook account, and because they weren’t an advertiser, there was nowhere for them to go. As an advertiser, you can figure out how to go into the back end and actually get a human being and have them call you.

So there’s another reason that you want to be, you know, on Meta anyway, you know, it gives you a little bit more pull when you need to talk to somebody. And just the ability to talk to somebody when something goes wrong is really important. So I would recommend even just a little ad spend. $250 can make a difference. $2,000 can make a world of difference. With $2,000 a month, you can have hundreds of thousands of people see your content. With $250, you can have thousands of people see your content, depending on what it is.

19:33
KILEY: Exactly. I think that’s something that scares people away from ads, is that they think they need to have this massive budget to see results, or for it to be worth it. And that’s just not true. There are a handful of clients for us. You know, one of the clients that I work on their ads, they’re $10 a day. I mean, think of it. That’s $365 a year. To a lot of brands, that’s not really that much. And sure, we’ve worked with the clients before that are, you know, giving us $4,000 a month to spend, and is there a difference in the results? For sure, but even that $10 a day budget— I know, Lori, I think it was on LinkedIn you worked with one that was even less than that, and you still see results. So whatever you have to throw at it, try it. I would really, really, really implore brands to give it a try because I don’t think if you’re doing it right, or if your team is doing it right, that you’ll be disappointed with the results that you see at all.

20:30
LORI: No, you will not. You will not. Yeah, and it’s really interesting. Of course, we’re the experts, so we’re happy to help you with that. Meta’s back end is a dumpster fire. You hear us say that all the time in the dumpster fire, but it’s our dumpster fire, and we know how to navigate around it. So if you need help, get in touch.

So that’s what we have for you today around organic content. We could talk social media day and night, 24/7, but we will let you go back to your world, and we’ll be back again in about a week with another episode. But in the meantime, we have a website at popspeeddigital.com, if you’d like to know more about us, and Kiley and I are both open networkers on LinkedIn, so hit us up there if you would like to hear more about what we do as a company or how you can connect to us. Please feel free to reach out to us there as well. So we’ll see you again soon. Thanks for joining us today.

KILEY: Bye, everybody.