We want to know how organic social media is performing, and what are its challenges and opportunities for startup businesses.

Top three challenges of organic social media

1.     Too many people are using social media

And that’s a bad thing, why?

More social media accounts means there is more content shared monthly/weekly/daily/hourly. This means that whenever organic social media posts are published, they are competing against a greater pool of posts for social media users’ attention. This impacts on reach and impressions, but also on engagement and lead opportunities. For startups, the challenge is even harder than for established businesses, because they have to build their audience from scratch.

2.         New policies and regulations

New policies and regulations, such as the tone of voice or what is considered proper social media conduct can be interpretable. This can limit creativity when it comes to designing hype visuals and captions, using language that is familiar and relatable to a specific category of social media users, that the company targets. The challenge here is that when posts lack a personal touch, they won’t generate the intended impact on the targeted audience. Startups with a specific audience risk not relating to their targeted audience.

3.           Changing algorithms

When social media channels record impressive growth, their algorithms change. Currently, Facebook, Instagram, and more recently LinkedIn, disfavor organic content, especially for business accounts, reducing the reach and impressions for posts belonging to such accounts. Their purpose is to push companies towards paid content. This can appear discouraging for startups, adding up to their efforts to build their followers, and then to show their messages to as many people as possible, organically.

So, is organic social media still working for business accounts?

While the above challenges picture a tough environment for businesses to compete for users’ attention on social media, let’s not forget that this is an ever evolving place to communicate to your audience. Especially for a startup business, it’s key to capitalise on the opportunities presented below.

Top three opportunities of organic social media

1.      Social media groups

Social media groups create more engagement, because they’re more authentic, allowing creators to connect with their target audience. However, this is not a place for promoting company updates and products, as they will be considered spammy, it’s more of a place to create a community.

For startups, groups represent an excellent way to get together people who share similar values, causes, or interests. It allows admins and members to share photos, content and stories that can serve as insights into your audience’s needs and untapped wants.

2.        Exploring new social media features, like stories and Reels

While algorithms for organic posts are changing, new social media features come to help those doing organic social media. LinkedIn stories represent an amazing feature that companies can utilise organically to grow their website traffic, or to direct users to a conversion page, by adding a link to the story. Instagram’s Reels offer the opportunity to get more impressions than with regular posts, and keep users engaged with entertaining, fun content.

Features like these, and others to come, offer startups the opportunity to target users through a vivid, modern and entertaining approach.

3.          Finding opportunities in less used social media channels

Are you using Quora, Reddit or Pinterest for your business? You should, because they generate organic traffic even months or years after publishing a post on these platforms. High quality entries with answers to specific questions that your audience might be interested in, let users know that you’re an experienced and authoritative source for what they’re looking for.

That being said, organic social media is all about keeping up with trends and changes across social media platforms, and even driving the change. One way to do that is by utilising the force of social media communities, advocating new social media trends and behaviours for them to follow.