One of the biggest problems facing social media teams is not the hellscape that is Meta Business Studio or lack of budget and resources (although those are right up there), it’s the misuse of organic social media.

Businesses want to make money, and making money equals success, so it's not surprising that a lot (many, most) companies think that organic social media content should directly generate revenue. 

To expect or want organic social media content (or content marketing in general) to directly/immediately convert into money is, first and foremost, a complete and utter misunderstanding of what organic social is. A real smooth-brained take, if you will. 

To get to the heart of this misunderstanding, you first need to understand the difference between customer and audience.

You target your ads to potential and returning customers. But, stay with me now, you should be targeting your organic social content to a much larger pool of people: an audience. *jazz hands* 

Now, maybe you're thinking that an audience should just be people who will become customers one day but that's the smooth brain talking again. Let's say you sell hats for cats. Your customers would be cats who want to wear hats (or rather owners of cats who want to force them to wear hats). But your social media audience should be way bigger than that: cat owners. Or even more biggest: cat lovers!

And you want to focus on an audience instead of just your customers because of course you want to reach as many people as possible, right? Right. And no, not just so you can turn them into customers.

An audience has so much more potential beyond converting customers, like: 

• Growing brand awareness and building brand loyalty and social currency. 

• Having a highly engaged community. 

• Being seen as subject matter experts/trusted in your industry. 

Soft-sell content versus hard-sell content. 

If you're thinking this all sounds like it will take a long time, you would be correct. To embrace audience potential is to embrace the long game. Another way to think about it is hard-sell versus soft-sell content. 

Hard-sell content, like paid social, has the explicit and sole purpose of selling a product or service.

Soft-sell content, like organic social media, provides something of value or interest to an audience, starts conversations, creates connections, grows audiences/communities, and otherwise works to build a brand’s social currency/influence. 

To put it into context and so I can talk about cats and cats wearing hats again: organic social media content is never going to lead to the hard sell like, "the cat hat company posted on their IG which then resulted in 10 cat hat sales." Instead, it's more like "the cat hat company posted a funny infographic about cat care on their IG and it really resonated with one of their followers who then left a comment, and that led to another follower sharing the post to their Stories and then one of their followers saw that and thought, 'I like cat content and this is good cat content,  I'm going to follow them even though I don't own a cat that I can try to make wear hats,' and then months later another friend asked them if they knew of any cool shops that sold cat hats and they were all, 'actually, I do!'" 

A little roundabout, yes, but just as powerful as a hard-sell.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go find a hat to try to force my cat to wear.