There’s no doubt that paid ad targeting on Facebook and LinkedIn can help you to attract relevant audiences, but have you considered how organic targeting could help to re-engage existing audiences?
Organic targeting simply presents different messages to certain sections of your audience, segmented by demographics such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Relationship status
- Education
- Interests
- Location
Organic targeting really comes into it’s own for organisations that have lots of different audiences following a small amount of accounts on social media.
For example, leisure organisations may have customers in their audience that are only interested in swimming sessions, while others only enjoy exercise classes. To create engaging content for both segments of their audience, organic targeting should be used.
Organic targeting means you can push certain messages to the specific segment that it is relevant for, rather than the whole audience.
This way, you can publish the right content for each audience segment without spamming your whole audience with irrelevant updates.
Content relevancy is a huge factor in social media algorithms, so only showing organic content to the right segment will skyrocket your engagement, so the algorithm will show it to more people that fit the segment.
Oh, and there’s also one other obvious bonus to organic targeting: It’s free!
So how can you actually use organic targeting on your own social media content?
Use Case #1: Testing Content Before Investing in Ads
Using organic targeting means that you can test out your content before deciding whether to put ad spend behind it. This is a great way to test responses and gives an indication on how it would perform as sponsored content.
In some cases, you may even find that your organically targeted campaign is successful enough on its own that you need not spend any additional budget on paid ads. However, you will only know by experimenting with organic targeting first!
Use Case #2: Recruitment Through Social Media
Secondly, consider how your recruitment activity could be improved by directing certain job opportunities or careers information to the audience that is most interested in that specific position.
Generally, job vacancies will have prerequisites like location, education and interests, so targeting your content to these audience factors will help to show the job post to the most suitable candidates.
Recruiting care workers in local government are notoriously difficult as the work can be very challenging. Most individuals that would be interested in your vacancy are likely already working in care or have a distinct interest in the sector.
With this knowledge, you can create tailored content, organically targeted to those individuals without potentially annoying your wider audience that wouldn’t be interested in the job role.
Use Case #3: Create Tailored Social Media Content
To be successful on social media, audiences expect more personalised and relevant content. Organic targeting helps you to do this, especially when you have lots of difference audiences on each social media channel.
This is already put into practice by many different police forces who target updates about incidents or road closures to individuals living in post codes near to the accident. This is purely because they know that their audiences are only really interested in situations that could affect them!
Use Case #4: Better Understand Your Social Media Audiences
Finally, organic targeting is a great opportunity to learn more about your audiences. By experimenting with segmenting your following you will quickly start to understand which are your most engaged demographics and which you may need to work harder to drive conversations with.
Remember to save your targeting preferences into templates so that you can more easily spot trends and patterns in certain audiences. This then gives you a foundation from which to continuously improve templates to achieve results.
Tools like SoCrowd can help to put these tactics into practice. You can select from organic targeting options or pick from saved templates to target different audiences, all as part of the streamlined SoCrowd posting out process, ensuring this tactic is easily implemented.
Have you experimented with organic targeting on social media? We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback @SoCrowd!
