The organic peak
Whether it’s TikTok, Instagram or a business platform like LinkedIn, every emerging social media platform offers an organic reach to boost the popularity of the platform. At this stage, it’s interesting for every entrepreneur or organization to build brand awareness and a community.
Double Peak Line Graph.
Source: buffer.com
Personally I don't understand why we resist this phase, because this is the easiest phase to reach large numbers of people 'free of charge' and with little effort. As soon as the second group (the early majority) joins the platform, the platform slowly moves towards a mainstream phase.
Although there is a larger audience on the platform, it also makes it harder to stand out with your content and message. This is the moment when people will think it is the algorithm, but the truth lies elsewhere. At a birthday with 10 people, you simply stand out more than at a birthday with 100 people.
With declining results, many of us are looking for reasons and solutions. One of the solutions is to pay for visibility.
The paid peak
When the platform slowly becomes saturated, the platform approaches a mature phase. In this phase, it is relatively challenging to create organic visibility. This is the moment that sponsored ads often come into play.
In this phase, it is more about stimulating clicks, conversions, sales and downloads. The business KPIs will gain more and more ground, but the click prices are many times higher in this phase than in the initial phase. Also, the early adopters will move to other channels. This also happened with Hyves, for example. The early adopters moved to Facebook. And this also happened later with Facebook. Then they moved to Instagram.
I and many others have built our business on and around LinkedIn. Is that smart? Not really, because if the platform pulls the plug tomorrow, our business model will no longer work. This also applies to marketers or entrepreneurs who are working on a large following.
Find a way for these connections and followers to sign up for your own mailing list, so they are known on your b2b email list own server. Spread the opportunities across different social media and ”enjoy the ride as long as it takes”.
Climbing a mountain.
Every challenge has an advantage!
Although LinkedIn will one day be replaced by the vast majority, this platform still moves forward as the popular kid in class and gives away a huge amount of free reach.
So now it is interesting to find a combination between organic reach and sponsored content, because the reach is large and the click price is relatively low.
More tips:
1. During LinkedIn's organic peak, it is interesting to enthuse, involve and motivate employees to work on their personal brand. Their organic success is the success of the organization! Remember that 10 employees with 2,500 connections always generate more reach (25,000 together) than a company profile with 4,000 connections!