Ten ways to make the most of your organic posts in 2021

Last time we discussed why it's still worth posting organically as a business on your social media accounts (if you missed it, click here!), so today we are going to take a look at how to maximise your organic social media posts' results.

Your organic social media posting should be about offering value to your potential clients (both freely and through your services/products) and experimenting to find out what resonates with your audience.

Although there is no 'one size fits all' approach to organic social media marketing, there are some universal best practices that should help elevate you social media marketing if you have found it has become a bit stagnant!

Here's ten easy ways to help you improve your organic social media marketing:

1. Include posts that feature pictures of you

You might have already heard this one, but people are currently big on seeing the person behind the business - yep, you! Whenever I post a photo of me, whether it is a professional photo, edited or just a quick snap from my phone, they always do better than just about any of my other posts, it's actually a bit crazy! If you haven't been posting yourself recently, this is your reminder!

2. Include posts that feature people

This one is fairly similar to the first idea, but I have definitely noticed increased exposure and engagement when I am able to post an image of my services (design, marketing, photography) that include people in it. Whether this is a photograph I have taken or a photo of my artwork with an audience in it, having people in my organic posts definitely creates a boost in activity.

3. Have an actual posting strategy

A good way to improve your organic social media results is by actually creating a bit of a plan (also known as a marketing strategy) around the content you are posting. Instead of posting on the fly, a marketing plan can help you decide on post ideas in advance that you know your audience will appreciate.

For more on this topic check out my previous blog post: How to plan your social media marketing for the month

4. Find the best time to post for your audience

Your posting time is super important to help your organic reach. You generally want to be posting when your audience is online so they can engage with the post and increase the chances of them seeing it organically. Everyone's ideal posting time will differ and it can even differ on different days of the week. Find yours out through trial and error and then make sure you're posting at your optimal time(s)!

5. Utilise different post formats - especially the new ones!

Make sure you utilise all the different post formats available to you on the different social media platforms, especially the newbies! This is because new features are what the platforms are trialling so they often reward you with better exposure when you use them.

Trying out different post formats is also useful to you so you can find out what ones resonate best with your audience. Once you work that out you can focus more on that!

6. Include a few sales posts

Despite what you have heard, it's still important to add in a few sales posts. Chances are your audience wants to buy from you, but sometimes they need to be reminded on how to do this and a couple of well placed sales posts can be the key!

If you find sales posts hard you can consider trying these less aggressive methods:

• Using testimonials to highlight your services and adding what that service is to the caption.

• Highlighting your services through previous work.

• Promoting a new service or product.

• Promoting a sale.

Or you can just post directly about your services and/or products, it's totally up to you!

7. Don't always include a link

If you're posting on a platform that allows you to add a direct link (or URL) make sure you don't include one in every single one of your posts.

The reason for this is that adding a link can affect your exposure of a post. This is because by adding link you are encouraging your audience to go to another website and your social media platform generally doesn't like that. Social media platform algorithms are designed to keep you on their platform. Just think about Instagram, who have only just opened up links in stories for everyone, not just those accounts with a massive amount of followers, and who still don't allow for live links in captions in the app.

Don't get me wrong, adding links to social media posts can definitely pay off, just be mindful of your expected exposure and engagement on the actual posts and how often you adding your links to your captions!

8. Schedule your posts to help minimise the amount of time you spend on your social media marketing

The biggest cost of organic social media is the time you spend on it. It can be a massive time-suck if not managed properly and this can discourage you especially if you don't feel that you are seeing return on that time investment.

My number one suggestion for your social media marketing these days is to batch plan, create and schedule your posts to cut down on the time you spend on this task! This will cut down on the amount of time you spend creating and posting on social media, as well as help you have a bit of a strategy to your posting.

I've put some blog posts together for you to look at if you want further help on this topic:

• How to plan your social media marketing for the month

• How to batch create your content

• How to schedule your social media marketing for the month

Or click here to have a look at my social media marketing course that will make you a batching superstar!

9. Look at some of the data and tweak your organic marketing plan in response to it

Make your life easier by taking out some of the guess work of creating organic posts by utilising some of the data you can access on the different social media platforms. Before you start, go through your posts for the last batch period (a month, a fortnight etc) and see what posts performed well and got a good response from your audience (likes, comments, shares, saves, link clicks etc).

Once you have identified the posts look at the following:

• What content was in the posts>

• What imagery was in the posts?

• What was your caption like, was it short or long, used paragraphs, emojis?

• What time was it posted?

• What were the hashtags (if applicable)?

Hopefully you will notice a bit of a pattern in one of the above categories, or will eventually notice a pattern (this might take more than one go at looking at your data). When you do, make sure you use this information and add more posts that follow this 'recipe'!

10. Tag others in your posts

Don't forget to tag others in your post to help increase the chance of shares and exposure to a new audience (aka not your accounts). This can be utilised in posts or stories and you could be tagging a business or an individual - just don't be dodgy and tag people when it's not relevant!

11. BONUS TIP: Don't get caught up in the vanity metrics

It can be easy to feel like you can't work out organic posting when you see other people getting amazing results BUT it is super important to remember, you can usually only see the vanity metrics of others which includes things like like count, comment count and follower count. These numbers might look good when they are high but in reality, if you are running a business and posting on social media you are actually posting on social media to help you GET SALES. If you post an image and link to your new service/product on Facebook and only get two likes, however you get 3 link clicks and one sale that is a WIN!! Sometimes we need to remember the bottom line of why we are putting the effort into our social media marketing (both organic and paid) and not get caught up in the hype data.