How to Nail Organic Social Media Growth: Tips, Tools, and Strategies

Organic social growth refers to the boost in visibility from posting visual content such as photos, videos, reels, and stories on social media. It lets you drive brand awareness and build meaningful relationships with your target audience.

Unlike paid ads, it’s a free way of advertising your products and services by sharing valuable content that offers a joyful experience to the users.

But it’s getting hard due to rising competition and curbs on the reach of organic posts by social networking sites. This post discusses the challenges to growing organically and how to counter them effectively.

It will share actionable tips and tools to help you build your brand organically on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

• Volatile social media algorithms and content saturation affect the reach of organic posts on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
• Organic social media growth is within reach when businesses create an impactful marketing strategy for each social channel and measure their efforts using a social media management tool.

  Buffer, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite are three advanced social listening tools most virtual graphic designer professionals use for easily scheduling posts and staying on top of all things social.

• Different marketing tactics work for growing organically on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

  While Instagram and Facebook favor visual-heavy content, insightful text-based posts and threads win on LinkedIn and Twitter.

• A hybrid marketing strategy is the answer to declining organic social media reach. Brands need to combine the wins of organic and paid social to reach their business goals.

Social media platforms work on a pay-to-play model where the brands that get success are majorly the ones putting dollars behind their marketing efforts.

The volatile ranking algorithms are constantly limiting the reach of organic content, and Facebook, in particular, has curbed the spread of non-promoted content over the years.

The average reach of an organic post on a Facebook page is 5.20%. This means only one in 19 fans see a page’s organic content. For big brands, it’s even less.

It leaves small businesses in a lurch as they don’t have the budget to go big on ad spending. What adds to this challenge is the phenomenon of the ‘content epidemic.’

There’s more content on social media than the feeds can hold. Every minute, there are above 510,000 comments and 293,000 status updates. Combine it with the fact that social networking sites constantly strive to offer their users the most relevant content.

And it’s not hard to make sense of the decline in organic reach for optimizing user experience and increasing engagement.

But does that mean organic social media is a lost cause? On the contrary.

Organic social media growth is crucial for winning customer trust and building brand credibility. It’s what acts as a bedrock for paid ads, and unless you invest in getting yourself off the ground through organic means first, your paid campaigns will fail to pull in the desired results.

Here’s how you can ramp up you organic social media growth with the help of remote graphic designer.

1. Pick the Right Channel

Social media marketing involves optimizing content depending on the business and the channels your target audience hangs out on. If your brand caters to young millennials, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok will work better than LinkedIn and Twitter, which work superbly for B2B organizations.

Your remote graphic designer can do a thorough research and create suitable content for the right social media platform to use its features to the fullest potential.

2. Create a Strategy

Use your remote graphic designer to perform research on your audience and competitors to create a tailored strategy for each channel (more on this below). In an article for Forbes, Andrew Brooks, Sinclair Global Founder, notes that “building a brand is both a creative venture and a journey of discovery.”

It needs a mindset that rests on “selling a lifestyle” and does not see social as another channel to promote products and services.

Customers are no longer interested in hearing about the latest launches. To intertwine them with your brand, you need to become a part of their daily lives and engage with them personally.

Brooks shared how he did that at Sinclair Global:

“Most of the content my company posts is really based on us. We post funny moments in life, our weekend brunches with friends, etc. We essentially show them what real life looks like. At the same time, we have the hype of unique aspects of our lives, with photos and stories featuring our crew socializing with professional athletes, chart-topping musicians and Hollywood celebrities.”

This diverse marketing strategy allows brands to show off products and services without overselling them and find a way into their customers’ hearts.

Your remote graphic designer evaluates what content type is helping your competitors drive engagement on social and be on the lookout for content gaps. These are topics your target audience wants to explore but does not have the resources for currently.

Let your virtual graphic designer create content to answer these micro-moments and win eyeballs.

3. Engage Employees 

Brand advocacy works like magic for organic social media growth on sites like LinkedIn. And nobody can better hoot for your business than internal team members.

Nearly 72% of customers said they felt closer to a brand whose CEO and employees posted regularly on their handles and trusted them over journalists and advertisers.

Advocacy platforms like Hootsuite Amplify let employees share vetted social content with their friends and followers. You can either opt for one of these or just go the classical way and ask your teammates to give their workplace a shoutout on their profiles.

But do not forget to share their insights on your official company page.

Image Source: LinkedIn

This is how we do it on our LinkedIn. Check our page for more amazing tricks!

 4. Provide Value

Part of what makes organic social media growth so tricky is that social media is not a tool to, as Dave Willis said, “impress people; use it to impact people.” Brands must offer valuable content to their followers to give them a reason for following and sharing their posts.

That value could be entertaining, informative, or motivational, depending on the business type, target audience, and social media platform.

Source: Instagram

If you run a local hair salon, then strategize content ideas like styling tips with your remote graphic designer and post it on your Instagram page can capture the attention of youngsters looking to experiment with their hairstyles.

Similarly, since adults over 65 are Facebook’s rapidly growing audience segment, sharing handy tips or exercise tutorials on knee joints through an appealing infographic can work wonders for a small business selling physio and ortho products, for example.

Check out this infographic posted by a Delhi-based medical center called AktivHealth on the benefits of 30-mins walk every day. It’s informative and gently encourages people to adopt a healthy lifestyle.

Image Source: Facebook

5. Host Virtual Events

Tequia Burt’s analysis of research studies by Content Marketing Institue and MarketingProfs revealed that virtual events, webinars, and online courses were the top-performing content marketing assets during the pandemic.

And unsurprisingly, businesses planned on allocating a considerable chunk of the marketing budget to digital events to engage their audience in the post-pandemic future.

Image Source: LinkedIn

A budget-friendly asset, virtual events help businesses stir buzz around their brands and up the entertainment quotient. They also let you collect insightful data and your remote graphic designer can repurpose it as blog posts and short social media creatives.

While webinars are the most popular virtual event type for B2B brands, businesses in the B2C space can experiment with Ask Me Anythings (AMAs) and live streams on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Check out this Q&A uploaded as a post by Ladies and Luggage on its Instagram handle. You can also try this as a story and respond to questions over DMs.

To make it more fun and interactive, add your answers as story updates over the entire day and encourage people to come back for your replies!

Image Source: Instagram

6. Connect with People

That’s all it takes to boost organic social media growth. Simple.

A few ways to go about it are: provide quality customer support, use hashtags and leave comments on posts, tag followers in your stories when they show brand love, or ask for their feedback on the latest industry trends using creative polls on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Or you could do something as simple as post pictures with people.

A research study by Yahoo Labs and the Georgia Institute of Technology confirmed that photos containing faces get 32% more comments and 38% more likes. Increasingly, customers are moving away from brands that are out of touch with their reality.

They care about how a brand treats its employees and connect better with the latter than products and services.

Remember what I said about engaging employees earlier? Spotlight your teammates and remember to be diverse and inclusive. The more people see themselves in your content, the more they will engage and share it.

Let us hone in on strategies that work for organic social media growth on Instagram.

1. Instagram

Towards the end of 2021, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, posted a video on his Twitter account to announce that the social networking site was no longer “just a photo-sharing app.”

Nobody knew what that meant for small businesses until, as Sana Javeri Kadri put it, “the algorithm changed and our sales dropped horrifyingly.”

Kadri’s spice company owed its initial success to Instagram, but after the shift to video, the platform reduced the traffic small businesses get to their accounts and, consequently, websites.

When Instagram first arrived in 2010, posting pictures, writing a compelling caption, and including relevant hashtags were enough for sales.

But, after the change in 2021, it is no longer a low-cost advertising method. Businesses that do not regularly post the short-form videos called Reels not only appear below others but have considerably less engagement on their posts.

While posting videos is one way to grow your Instagram organically, here are others:

• Be consistent about putting out quality content. Fix a posting schedule and frequency by maintaining a social media calendar to track efforts. Research the best times to post on Instagram for your business and set expectations with the target audience.
• Apart from in-feed posts and Reels, let your virtual graphic designer experiment with content types like stories and IGTV episodes. Test a few stories every week in different formats and see what resonates with your followers to channel efforts in the right direction.

Image Source: Instagram

The above image shows how NY Times does this on its Instagram. Just the right mix of creatives and copy is enough to encourage readers to check out the complete story on the official website.

• Post contests, quizzes, and giveaways to hook customer interest. It’s an interactive way to let followers know about the latest discounts, running schemes, and offers. You can also engage them further by including specific requirements for giveaways, such as following your handle and tagging friends in the comments.

Take a cue from how Safecup does it on its Instagram channel.

Image Source: Instagram

• Use cross-platform promotion to direct people to your profile. Highlight your presence on Instagram by using another visual-heavy platform such as Pinterest to distribute Instagram content.

  Another way is by adding social media buttons in your website’s footer and newsletter. Add your Instagram account to in-store signage to do the trick offline.

• Get micro- and nano-influencers to give your brand a shoutout. Though with a smaller following, they have super specific niches and a highly engaged audience. Partner with them to gain traction and establish trust in your business.
• Lastly, do not overlook one-on-one engagement. It’s a surefire way of growing Instagram organically. Reply to queries, brand mentions, comments, and repost user-generated content.

  Actively engage on your Instagram feed to build long-lasting customer relationships and move past announcing boring company updates.

Image Source: Instagram

Big clothing brands like H&M make customer engagement a top priority on their social profiles. Notice how they respond almost instantly to a follower’s query and take the conversation forward by asking them to check out other styles matching their taste?

2. Twitter 

Twitter is the hub of political discourse and memes. But it’s also the most prime and underused social media platform by brands for engaging with target audiences.

Twitter has 436 million monthly active users, and its revenue rose to $1.284 billion in 2021, making it a lucrative platform for business growth. No one can say what new Twitter will look like with Elon Musk at the helm.

But here are a few best ways that you can (still) use to increase the reach of organic posts:

• Keep messages to the point, and do not go overboard with hashtags. Use 1-2 per tweet, trying to include them naturally in your copy and maintaining a conversational tone.
• Do not write tweets in all-caps. Consider emojis to add emotions to your copy and include strong calls to action.
• Go easy on text-heavy images. For videos, keep them to 15 seconds or less. Be mindful of people with hearing disabilities and always use captions or any other ‘sound-off strategy.’
• When driving to links, use website buttons to make the images and videos clickable. Create content themes for each day of the week and find opportunities to take part in recurring weekly hashtags.
• Maintain a content bank of evergreen and approved tweets to send out using a social media management tool. Test your performance and dig into data to find which copy, creative, and tone resonates the most with followers.
• Track indirect mentions of your brand in keywords and hashtags and be prompt with responses. You can also improve the response time by creating pre-saved answers to common questions that come your way.
• Finally, watch out for trending topics in your niche and engage in ongoing conversations to push people to check out your profile.

3. Facebook 

Facebook is the world’s oldest and largest social network, with over 2.7 billion monthly active users. It commands a quarter of all digital ad spending, making it the no. 1 platform for marketing despite its steady curb on organic posts.

The average organic Facebook page gets only 0.07% engagement, and the shifting Facebook algorithms are making it harder than ever for brands to reach their audience.

Image Source: Smart Insights

This state of affairs makes it important to understand how algorithms work to ace organic social media marketing on the site.

As of 2022, there is no News Feed, and what comes up when your followers scroll through Facebook is simply called Feed. It’s a place where users get stories “that are meaningful and informative.”

And what determines this is a set of three main ranking signals: who posted it, content type, and interactions:

• Who posted it: Followers will see content from sources they interacted with, including friends and other businesses.
• Content type: Their feed will be curated for types of content depending on the past engagement. If they engage with photos, the Facebook feed will show photos. If it’s videos, they will get more audio-visual content.
• Interactions: Your followers will get posts that stir up engagement, especially from people they interact with on the site.

With this in mind, follow these tips to nurture organic conversions and reduce the cost per click of paid campaigns on Facebook:

• Use Audience Insights to build a target persona for your Facebook page and attract the right demographics to engage with content and boost marketing campaigns.
• Publish evergreen content like video tutorials, interviews, thought leadership insights, industry news, and snippets from “how-to” posts, as these have a longer lifespan and remain useful for audiences for extended periods.
• A virtual graphic deisgner must remember to- keep posts short, visuals solid, and calls to action creative. Do not ask people to like and comment on your posts alone. Instead, go the next step and nudge them to check your website for more info about a product or service.
• Create a Facebook group for the most engaged customers or join another active niche-related group that’s both active and serves business goals. The idea is to use a group for building a vibrant community around your brand and keep it active through a solid content strategy.

  Safecup’s Facebook group is a cool hangout zone for women to discuss their menstruation woes. The brand keeps it pulsating throughout the year and shares informative tips on using its products properly by engaging with customers in the comments!

Image Source: Facebook

No matter what you sell, community groups on social networking sites are a great way to build your online presence and turn customers into loyal brand ambassadors over time.

• Use organic post targeting to ensure your content reaches the right people. Like Facebook Ads, it helps distribute posts to customers based on their age and location and is particularly useful against the decline in organic reach on Facebook.
• Post updates at the optimal time. Consider your audience’s profile, the type of content you put out, and when your fans are most active daily and weekly.

  Dig into Facebook insights to collect this info and post during the peak-off hours when the highest number of followers are online.

• Use the latest features and updates to promote your organic posts. The hottest ones in the market right now are Facebook Messenger Bots, 360-degree photos and videos, Facebook Stories, Facebook Offers, Facebook Watch, and Facebook Marketplace.

Next, let’s look at the most effective ways for building your brand organically on LinkedIn.

4. LinkedIn 

LinkedIn is all about building professional networks and connecting with business influencers. Unlike Instagram, a favorite among B2C brands, this social platform is for B2B companies.

Globally, it has an active user base of 830 million and is the top most-used platform for the distribution of both organic as well as paid content.

But here’s the thing: LinkedIn has one of the most educated bases on social media.

Unless you know your stuff, there’s no point in marketing on LinkedIn. And if that wasn’t reason enough, LinkedIn algorithms favor content from people over pages – making growing a professional page a highly challenging task.

To grow your company page followers and engagement organically on LinkedIn, follow these tactics:

• Get your employees to connect their accounts to the page properly by adding their current job role in the work experience section. It’s often an overlooked part of setting up a profile and a necessary best practice for organic social media growth for businesses.

See how our team members linked their profile to the company page?

Image Source: LinkedIn

• Ask a few chosen employees to invite their connections to the company page manually. Do not cold-invite users as it can be off-putting to get DMs from random people and does not help with a great first impression.
• Ask team members to add the page’s link to their email signatures. It’s a subtle and non-jarring way of getting your brand in front of new prospects and leads.
• Use LinkedIn’s native ‘Notify Employees’ feature to update team members about new posts on the company page so that they can engage and share them with their networks.
• Post engaging videos in the form of client testimonials and product demos to drive traffic to your website. But do not forget to optimize your content for users on mobile.
• Publish long-form thought leadership content on the latest industry breakthroughs to cement your position as a leading expert with a distinct voice.
• Include questions and polls in posts to make them more interactive and invite readers to take forward the conversation in the comments. Try to respond to all the replies and keep the comment threads active.
• Follow community hashtag topics from your company page and respond to the trending content showing in the feed. Post content around these trending topics and use relevant hashtags to increase its reach.

  Here are two community hashtags on Zomato’s LinkedIn.

Image Source: LinkedIn

The debate between paid vs. organic social media has been raging for quite some time now due to the decline in organic social media growth. But the most effective social media strategy combines the power of both paid ads and organic posts to reach business goals.

To bolster your organic efforts, you must:

• Measure the performance of your social content (more on it in a sec) and select the best organic posts for boosting through paid ads.

  It’s an entry-level (and pocket-friendly) trick for businesses new to the social field that may not have a huge budget for promoting their content.

• Set up manual split tests for organic content and track them using UTM parameters. This A/B testing helps you check messaging, brand positioning, visuals, ad format, and copywriting to understand what’s working on your social media accounts and which content format is not.
• Use retargeting ads to hook leads who already know your business through organic marketing but need a gentle nudge to return to your handle and explore new offerings.

  It is a low-cost and foolproof tactic to spark lost interest in your company’s services.

The next section looks at the social media management tools for brands to size up their social media marketing strategy.

Social media tracking tools ready you for organic growth by providing:

• Cross-platform support, so you don’t waste time checking every social handle multiple times a day for updates
• Options to schedule future posts and ace your social media posting schedule
• Data-informed insights on the wins and losses of your content efforts

The three best ones dominating the industry are:

1. Buffer

Buffer offers support for all the major social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can use it to set up a schedule for posting updates on your profiles according to time zone and the target audience’s social media surfing habits.

Image Source: Buffer

Pricing: It has a free plan for one user account.

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a great tracking tool for social listening, engagement, publishing, and measuring current strategy. In addition to basic tracking features, it has the option for designing and sending personalized messages to prospective customers.

You can also use its customer service features and provide support to your followers.

Image Source: Sprout Social

Pricing: Sprout Social offers three paid plans, with the lowest one available at $89 per user/month. Though paid, it has a free 30-day trial window for users who may not be ready to make the switch just now.

3. Hootsuite 

Hootsuite offers the best social media management features to take charge of your content calendar. You can use it to schedule posts and review content in an intuitive calendar view.

It lets you access images directly from the dashboard for posting and determine what your customers think by keeping a tab on the latest trends, conversations, and brand mentions.

Image Source: Hootsuite

Pricing: Hootsuite has four plans for different social needs. Growing companies can subscribe to its ‘Professional’ pack and connect up to 10 accounts to access their social inboxes from one central place and schedule unlimited advanced posts.

Organic social media can get quickly overwhelming for small business owners who often juggle many tasks and don’t have the time to engage with their customers daily.

To build long-term and meaningful customer relationships on different channels, they can hire a marketing virtual assistant to manage their social media operations. SPEAK WITH US with us to pair you with the right fit today and get ready to kickstart social growth.