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The Future of Social Media: Paid vs. Organic

The Future of Social Media: Paid vs. Organic

The future of social media is in paid content, which requires a different strategy than organic. How can you prepare?

Social media started as an organic marketing tool with an emphasis on creating engaging and interesting content that people actually liked. Over the past three to five years, paid (or sponsored) content has become a staple of most social media marketing efforts. While Facebook has been the clear leader in driving paid social media content by actively reducing the exposure of organic content, most other social networks are testing paid content (including newer networks like Pinterest and Instagram).

The Future of Social Media Is Paid

There is no doubt that the future of social media includes paid as a significant component for a number of reasons:

• Social networks have to pay their bills, and ad revenue is the primary way that they do it.
• The growing popularity of social networks and their rise as the number one activity online makes them the place that businesses can go to achieve mass awareness. Big brands are paying for social (and driving up the price of advertising).
• Most social networks will have paid content in the future.

Paid Requires a Different Strategy vs. Organic

Organic social media is based on the assumption that you have to earn your way into the newsfeed with great content that people love. Most organic social media posts aren't directly selling, because selling is rarely interesting enough to drive engagements. The premise of organic social media content is permission-based marketing, which means that your marketing must be good enough for people to opt-in.
Paid is a different animal. Paid is about creating posts that both grab attention and stand out in the cluttered social media newsfeed, but also clearly build your brand. Paid social media marketing is often closer to interruption marketing, which is when you pay money to interrupt people with your marketing message.
Each of these approaches requires a different strategy. The best social ads include the elements of interruption marketing as well as permission marketing. They are interesting posts that people would choose to share and look at, but are also clearly building business value. Not every social media update is appropriate for paid support, and not every paid post would make a great organic post.
The search industry has been divided into these buckets for years, with search marketers specializing in paid or organic search. Both require different skills and approaches to getting attention in search engines. While they are strategically linked, the skills to execute each strategy are different.
Social media, over time, will evolve to have specialists in both paid and organic since both require different skills.

How to Prepare

To prepare for the future of social media, there are a few things that you can do:

• Establish BOTH a paid and an organic strategy. Clearly define the type of content that you'll promote.
• Determine which people on your team have the skillset for organic vs. paid and treat them as related and linked, but not necessarily requiring the same skills.
• If you are a social media marketer, determine which (if not both) skills you want to hone.
• Start experimenting with paid sooner rather than later. Paid social ads (perhaps with the exception of Facebook ads) are still in their infancy. By experimenting now, you will be better positioned as it grows.

10 pros and cons of social media

Because of the way the internet has changed the way we communicate and interact with one another on so many levels; it’s become necessary to explore the pros and cons of social media and its effects on our society.

The Pros

1-Increased criminal prosecution because of social media
The NYC police department began using Twitter back in 2011 to track criminals foolish enough to brag about their crimes online. When the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup in 2011, their Vancouver fans took to the streets and rioted, but local authorities used social media to track and tag the people involved, and they caught people who were stealing during the riot.
2-Social networking creates new social connections
Statistics show that 70% of adults have used social media sites to connect with relatives in other states, and 57% of teens have reported making new friendships on social media sites.
3-Students are doing better in school
This is an interesting statistic about the pros and cons of social media and its effect on students doing well in school. Students with internet access at a rate of 50% have reported using social networking sites to discuss school work, and another 59% talk about instructive topics.
4-Better quality of life
If you want to talk about the pros and cons of social media, take a close look at all the support groups on Facebook. Members of these groups discuss their health conditions, share important information, and resources relevant to their conditions while creating strong support networks.
5-Social media as a source of employment
Job sourcing has gone modern thanks to social media. Sites such as LinkedIn are a major resource that 89% of job recruiters take advantage of when looking to hire potential employees.

Now let’s take a look at the Cons of social media.

1-Social media and the news
Much of the news information that people read about comes from social media websites, and that figure estimate is around 27.8 %. This figure ranks just under print newspapers at 28.8%, greater than radio’s figure of 18.8% and far outpaces the figure for other print publications at just 6%.
2-Too much misinformation
With the advent of the web, people started to create their own websites and blogs. While many of those blogs were just basic diaries, a few of them were about topics like health and politics while others were how to blogs.
Many blogs have turned into rumor mills, spreading misinformation that people tend to believe just because it’s on the web.
Rumors about hurricane Sandy and gunfights in other countries like Mexico have been picked up by reliable news services, and this misinformation has been shared without the proper vetting of the sources providing the information.
3-Pupils spending too much time on social media sites have lower academic grades
Here is another argument about the pros and cons of social media as it pertains to students. Statistics show that pupils using social media too often tend to have GPA’s of 3.06 compared to GPA’s of 3.82 for pupils who don’t use social media.
An even scarier fact is that students who use social media tend to score 20 % lower on their test scores then their counterparts.
4-Social media sites to blame for lost productivity
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are a direct cause for lost productivity at the workplace. In a survey 36 % of people said that social networking was the biggest waste of time in comparison to activities like fantasy football, shopping, and watching television.
5-Social media is the cause for less face to face communication
One last discussion about the pros and cons of social media is a lack of one on one communication. In a 2012 study families who reported spending less time with one another rose from a level of 8% in 2000 to 32% in 2011.
The study also reported that 32 % of the people in the survey either were texting or were on social media sites instead of communicating with each other during family gatherings.

The Best-Ever Social Media Campaigns

The Best-Ever Social Media Campaigns

Procter & Gamble ‘s Old Spice was just another guy brand with an entertaining spokesman in its TV commercials until the brand’s agency, Wieden + Kennedy, put Isaiah Mustafa on the Web recently and invited fans to use Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets to pose questions that he quickly answered. The questions poured in–even celebrities asked a few–and Mustafa responded in more than 180 Web videos shot quickly over a few days. The real-time effort was the first of its kind, but it won’t be the last.
Marketers are eager to find clever new ways to engage consumers online with branded content and interactive advertising that is good enough to make people want to share it with their network of friends. Consider Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken,” who has been taking commands on the Web since the guy in the chicken suit was introduced in 2004.
The Old Spice effort and Burger King’s order-taking chicken are among the best-ever social media campaigns identified by Forbes.com and a group of experts. Forbes tapped three experts to rank the 20 best-ever social media campaigns. The judges–David Berkowitz of the New York City agency 360i; Brandon Evans of the social marketing agency Mr. Youth in New York City and Michael Lebowitz of Big Spaceship, a digital ad shop in Brooklyn–were asked to take into account the success of the campaigns as well as the quality of the execution and creativity of each one.

In Pictures: The Best-Ever Social Media Campaigns

The judges shared the same opinions on some campaigns, such as the marketing effort behind The Blair Witch Project, which came in as the best-ever social media campaign–and one of the first of its kind. They were divided on others, such as Hotmail’s decision in 1996 to promote the e-mail carrier at the bottom of each e-mail sent. One judge gave it high marks because it was the first such effort. Another gave it a big yawn.
The final list included planned, strategic social media campaigns, like Bing’s partnership with the Facebook game Farmville to lure players to the search engine with a Farmville money reward. Others were quirky, small-budget Web efforts that started small and became big, such Blendtec’s “Will it Blend?” Web videos. This series of fun-to-watch Web videos feature company founder Tom Dickson destroying everything from a vuvuzela to Barbie dolls in a blender. Does it work? The company says home sales of blenders have jumped 700% since November 2006.
One key to a viral campaign is a message that is compelling and interesting enough that a viewer or participant wants to share it with a friend, says Issa Sawabini, a partner of the youth marketing agency Fuse. And social media is a tool that makes creating a viral or buzz-worthy campaign easier.
“A company can’t just create a viral video, put it on YouTube and hope that people will come,” he says. “You need to have something that is worth talking about.”
Some social media efforts disappoint marketers. In March 2009 Skittles redesigned its website to function as a Twitter page, with new updates for every Skittles-related tweet. Pranksters decided to lace Skittles tweets with vulgar language and profanities so they would end up on the candy’s website, forcing the Mars brand to abandon the campaign.
The bottom line is that a successful social media campaign requires creativity, a clear message and needs to make a splash at the right time. A good-looking guy in a bath towel doesn’t hurt, either

Courtesy : Forbes

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