Take the ladder!

If you are constantly promoting your products on Instagram and/or Facebook, people might get tired of watching your ads all the time and they might lose their effectiveness. That’s why it is important to have some periods without paid ads and let some organic growth happen.

Paid ads should be used when you have important information to share with your followers, like the launch of a new product or relevant news of any kind, but you have to be careful not abusing them because people might get used to seeing your ads and start ignoring them.

If you are beginning and want to let people know that there’s a new face in your business sector, that’s a different story. Awareness is one of the most important steps of every strategy and you should invest as much as possible in this, but just for a few months.

Once people know who you are and what you do, you can move on to the following stages of your campaign. You can boost some posts if you consider that the information they contain is relevant to your customers; but if you saturate people’s newsfeeds with your ads, they will unfollow you.

One thing that works very well for most brands is to alternate periods of paid reach with periods of organic reach – that means periods with paid ads and periods with no paid ads. That way people don’t get tired of you, and your business keeps growing.

As long as you have fresh content every week, everything is ok. Because if your only activity on social media is having paid ads campaigns and promoting your products, that means you are having long periods of inactivity and that is not good at all. It’s boring.

Remember, your content has to be of value to the people that follow you. Not every post should be about you selling your products like we have been discussing in previous posts. Your content should keep going independently of your ads, though they should be coherent.

That way people will be interested in seeing what’s going on on your social media profiles all the time, and not only when there’s a campaign running. This alternation of paid reach and organic reach is known as a ladder pattern of growth, because of the way it looks on a graph, and this is one of the best ways to grow on social media.

Even if you had the money to keep your ads running all year, you shouldn’t. That will get old fast. Try intercalating paid and organic reach and wait to see the results. In case you have something really important to share, you can always boost that post to help it get to where it needs to go.