We are all guilty of it: you just put your phone down and then after a second you pick it up again to check your TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook feed. And chances are that was what you were checking when you decided to put the phone down in the first place.

This is no accident. This is exactly how these social media platforms were designed, to keep you hooked. But that does not have to be such a bad thing. After all, there is so much amazing content being shared on these platforms. And thanks to the almighty algorithms, you’re always being served the content that is right in your wheelhouse.

For this reason, it is no surprise that social media marketing has become a popular tool for companies the world over. And the surge in digital interactions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic further increased the value of these platforms — according to a 2020 survey, 58 percent of consumers visited a brand’s social pages before visiting their website, up 81 percent from 2019. This set a precedent that is very likely to remain relevant well into the foreseeable future.

However, it is quite a challenge for companies to make these platforms work to their advantage. There are over 3.5 billion active daily social media users around the world and Facebook users, in particular, which account for over 1.5 of those 3.5 billion users, post more than 510,000 comments and 293,000 statuses every minute. In other words, more content is being published than there is space in the news feed to display it.

And, as was previously mentioned, algorithms also add to the challenge. Each user receives the most relevant content from Facebook and the content is often personalized to each user’s particular interests to increase engagement and improve user experience. So if a company’s brand doesn’t fall in their algorithm profile, they won’t be seeing that company’s content.

This has brought about the decline of organic reach, which is the number of people who see a brand’s content without paid distribution. Companies have long not stood out anymore among the heap of content on social media platforms by simply jumping up and down to reach users with their content. With Facebook’s current algorithm, just about 5.5% of a company’s followers see its organic posts.

For this reason, boosting has become one of the most effective paid advertising options for companies on Facebook, in particular. You have probably heard the term boosting before, but just in case you need a refresher: boosting entails paying a fee to boost a post on your page to make sure it appears higher on your consumers’ newsfeeds as a sponsored ad. And companies have taken to this tactic on Instagram and Twitter too. Although it must be said that Twitter is a lot more expensive to boost — the minimum amount available for ad spending is $50. Yikes.

While it is true that paid advertising, i.e., boosting posts, increases the visibility of a company’s posts and brand and can even broaden a company’s reach to foreign markets, this does not qualify it as the killer of organic social media. The best strategy for social media marketing is actually a combination of boosting your content and posting it “for free.” When users are driven to your company’s social pages by your sponsored ads, it is the organic content you have shared there that they will see. Thus having a stock of professionally-made high-quality organic content on hand, as well as a substantial number of followers, is crucial to establishing your company’s credibility.

Having an agency as a marketing partner to help you manage this tightrope is extremely beneficial to your company’s social media engagement and, ultimately, its success in the current era of digital marketing.

So let’s get you that engagement!