I’ve been on job boards and talking to recruiters a lot lately. It is all paid paid paid. It’s rare to hear anything about organic content whatsoever.

It’s not surprising. It reflects what a lot of blogs have been saying: Organic is dead and you have to pay to play. If this is true, of course you’re going to run after hiring people who will focus solely on ads.

But also, organic content seems super easy and like anyone can do it. Maybe that’s really the whole problem, but I think it’s a mixture of the two.

And yes, I do believe thinking organic content is not important is a huge problem. Let’s take a look at why.

What is organic content?

For those of you who may be scratching your head about what organic content is, it’s simply the content you put on social media. It can be used for advertising, but many times it’s not.

It can be images, graphics, videos or simply words. The “organic” refers to the fact that it finds its way to its audience through natural means. And that’s why it’s problematic for a lot of people.

Why is organic content not prioritized?

Standing in the way of the content and its audience is the algorithm. It wasn’t always like that. Pages posted content and knew that their fans would see it. But now, you need to hope that you hit all the right elements so that it ends up in front of your fans. Some of those elements you can control, but many you cannot.

On the other hand, by putting money behind your content, you do know that it will get into the hands of your audience. And if it’s not, you just put more money behind it. There just aren’t as many hoops to jump through.

In other words, organic content is hard and paid content is much easier if your sole goal is to get reach. Yes, that’s oversimplifying it because paid social has it’s own difficulties if you want to make it effective. But this is a big part of the reason why organic content gets de-prioritized.

It all works together

In truth, the best thing you can do is make all parts of your social media plan work together and not leave one in a silo. Because if you do leave organic content in that silo, it is going to lose all of its potential.

Organic content when done correctly can be the heart of a social media program. This is where you can really apply the work you do to get to know your audience. You can address their needs and wants. And you can provide opportunities for them to get to know each other so they can truly form a community. It’s particularly great for those who are new to brand and those who have moved onto being truly loyal ambassadors.

Ads can then be used to support this (among other things). It doesn’t even take a lot of money. If you keep a small budget for organic content and put it behind the best performing content, you can then reach much more people with the kind of content they actually want to see. That is absolute gold. And then you can use that information to feed into future ad content as well as other parts of your social media.

But how do you get through the algorithm?

The best way to get your content into more feeds is to encourage engagement. I see so many posts where there is no ask and no reason to engage. That is going to make your content not reach its full potential. Having an ask gives it more legs and more people end up seeing the post.

And to that end, you need to have a bunch of posts in your back pocket that you know are high engagement. What does that mean? That it hits a hot button with your fans and they can’t help but respond. They don’t have to be controversial or negative in anyway. It can be as simple as I used to have a client who had an ice cream company that people would turn off the highway to stop at. Asking people what kind of ice cream they love there was always a great high engagement post for that client.

I deploy those high engagement posts when the previous post did not perform as well as I needed and/or the next post needs a boost. This is because the algorithm uses previous posts to decide how many people need to see your next post. If your previous post was a dud, the algorithm assumes the next post will be a dud and not show it as many people. So a high engagement post can help you overcome that.

Also, don’t post links. Social media networks want to encourage fans to stay on the network and not to go off to some random website. So they will make sure not as many people see link content. You can get around this with posting an image and having the link in the caption or the first comment. And of course on Instagram, the link goes in the Stories or the bio, because no one can click on a link in the main feed.

You also want to avoid hashtags now. They used to be a way to get more people to see your content, but that’s not true anymore. The algorithm is much better at discovering subject matter and intent than it has ever been. That makes hashtags extraneous. And we don’t have enough characters for anything extraneous. Plus, they just make it a little harder to skim a post, which means fewer people will interact with it. It’s just better to dump them at this point unless it’s around an event or aligning with a community.

The bottom line: know your audience

And then there is the work you need to do. If you think social media is just about posting and that’s it, then yes, your organic content will not do well.

Take the time to get to know your audience. Talk with them and find out their needs and wants. Make sure you are connecting with that so they want to engage with you. You want them to see you as a valuable resource they continually can come back to or else they will move onto an organization that is. And there is just no better way to break through the algorithm than to simply know who your audience is and be responsive to what they need from you.

How are you using organic content?