Social Media: You have to pay to play

Paid advertising is 95% more effective than organic traffic

In his insightful article stuffed with charts, graphs and data, Neil Patel dissects and addresses some questions that we at Notionfront have thought about for our clients. Knowing how social media impacts ROI is something that you should care about because billions of eyes see it every year.

But social media is complex. You might be asking yourself which social media channels perform the best? Can I still gain views from organic traffic? Should I advertise with video?

The data used by Patel in this article was from a survey he performed using 483 B2B and B2C companies with revenues ranging from $10,000 per year to $250,000,000. He also broke all of the statistics down based on 100 social followers. So for example, if he looked at traffic, he looked at how many visitors were generated per 100 followers. His comparisons were across six platforms: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

Here’s what the survey found:

1. Since 2015, organic social traffic has decreased 38.6%. So, in 2015, you could generate just over 3 visitors a month from organic social media; now it’s right at 2 per month. The downward trend does not show signs of changing. Conversely, paid advertising results have greatly increased, effectively producing leads and generating traffic over organic.

2. YouTube outperforms Facebook in all data collected.

3. Posting on social channels more than 8 times per month produces diminishing returns. You have to produce engaging content for your followers. Period.

4. LinkedIn produced the most engagement overall, and it also crushes the others in producing email subscribers.

5. Video does well on LinkedIn and Instagram, not just YouTube.

Bottom line, you won’t get results from just organic traffic. You have to pay to play on the social media platforms. Taking a well-rounded and strategic approach to paid advertising that meets your goals and stays within your budget will position you and your company for success. Notionfront would like to help you accomplish those goals. Contact us to learn more.

Source: New Study: What 100 Social Media Followers Are Really Worth by Neil Patel