Why Social Media Organic Reach Is Dead And Native Ads Are The Future

If you’re like me and built multiple online businesses from the generously unpaid tools that major platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter offer, you might be wondering what has been going on with the algorithm these past 6 months. In this episode I explain that organic reach is dead based on my own experiences and the post insights provided by these platforms to measure the performance of your content. So what does this mean? It means that it is a pay to play world now where native ads are king and engaging creative, copy, and targeted hashtags are more important than ever.

Organic reach to accounts who weren’t following you used to be in the ballpark of 20-30% prior to 2018, meaning you were reaching more customers with potential interest in your products and services. This allowed brands to build a following of engaged users and stay connected with them through creative content that peaked their interest and paused their scrolling thumbs to click or read more. Now, the only way to penetrate new customers’ feeds as consistently as possible, is to give these platforms money in exchange for placement.

Was this all a set up from the beginning? Most likely. But we can’t complain about a free platform’s shift in kindness. Instead, there are a few things you can do to maximize organic reach while learning how to create effective native ads that work.

First: When posting, keep an eye on the engagement you see and immediately interact with those users. When you are interacting with users, these platforms see that you are delivering a better experience to those users, meaning the platform as a whole is now offering a better overall experience to the user. User experience is at the core of major social media platform’s agenda. User experience keeps their audience active on the platform, allowing them to deliver more ads, and therefore generate more revenue.

Second: Use every tool that the platform has to offer. On Instagram, leverage IGTV, Stories, and feed posts. On Facebook stories, groups and feed posts. On Twitter tweeting, retweets, media uploads, etc. When you are leveraging the tools they provide, social media platforms see that you are adding content to their database. More content in their database means more content for their users, and again, a better user experience is the catalyst to more ad revenue for these platforms.

Third: Make sure to target the correct audience when tagging and using hashtags on these platforms. If you have a photo with a baby in it, # bigbaby might not be the best tag as that can be a wife speaking about her husband. # cutebaby is more specific and targeted, so anyone interested in cute babies will see this image and hopefully interact at a 1-6% rate if you’re lucky. If you are delivering content to users who aren’t interested, they won’t engage and the platform will suppress the post.