Organic vs. Paid Social — Which Should You Start With?

Choosing between organic and paid social media comes down to three questions: what's your goal, what's your timeline, and what's your budget. Paid gets you speed, organic builds lasting brand equity, but the most successful strategies use both, with organic content fueling your paid creative and paid ads amplifying what's already working.

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So we get asked this question all the time, which is, “Should I start with organic or should I start with paid?”
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Everyone has an opinion about this, but there’s a decision framework that you should use,
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and it’s based on your goals, your budget, and your timeline.

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So let’s break down what the difference between organic and paid is for anybody that might not know this.
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So Joanna, you being the D.O.O. Director of Operations.
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Can you tell us? Tell me about organic.
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Yeah, so organic is what you’re posting on your pages that doesn’t have any ad spend behind it.

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So you are reaching an organic audience meeting your following.
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You can sometimes reach people beyond your following, but it’s essentially, that’s how we differentiate between what’s ads and what’s just on your page.
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We call it organic. So it does not have any money behind it, posting it to your following, and you’re growing your page organically.

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Nice. And then paid. So paid is the other side of that.
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Yeah, paid is the opposite. So paid is advertising. You’re putting money behind it.
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And I think the deeper version is that you can choose who you’re targeting.
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When you have dollar spend behind your creative, you can select and fine-tune.

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Where you’re spending that money, what eyeballs you’re paying for.
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Yeah, and when paid is run properly, it’s run on an ads manager.
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Not necessarily boosted. Now, boosting’s nice, right? Because you know, you get those vanity metrics, more people, some eyeballs on it.

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Maybe you get a couple more likes. A lot of the times, those people are in a different country and probably not going to be true brand ambassadors to you.
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So I think that’s a big differentiator is running true paid campaigns and doing it in a professional manner is typically run on one of the ad managers.

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That could be meta ads manager, tick tock ads manager, etc. Right? You know, we have people come to us and talk about talk about that and the difference of that all the time.
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So it is, if you are running paid, your money goes a lot further with an ads manager.
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Wonderful.

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Jason, you had so much input there. I just, I just, I was just taking back.
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I just sit back and watch you guys do your thing. I might need to use AI to decipher the knowledge chunks that you just want.
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You’re welcome. Yes, appreciate that. Cool.

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So the next point is the decision framework. So there’s a framework, but we typically ask, there’s a couple of questions we ask, which is, what is your primary goal?
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Your primary goal is going to dictate what you’re doing. So if you’re looking to build brand awareness and trust, organic first.

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If you’re looking for lead gen sales right away, you’re talking about paid first community building organic recruiting and employer.
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That’s kind of a bit of both, right? We’ve had some success with that in the past running recruiter ads for Baptist health. Who else?

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Green Bay converting. Yeah, not Berwood so much as PPLP, a fish processing company. We’ve done recruiting a fair bit.
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And I think I just want to say that the key word here is first. I think they’re both essential to any successful social media strategy.

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But if you have to kind of funnel your budget into one or the other first, then this is where the framework applies.
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100%, exactly, exactly. But what’s the timeline? If you’re looking for results in the first 30 to 90 days, definitely you want to have paid.

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If you’re looking at building a strong brand that’s going to last for months and years, organic first.
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I think part of it depends on the problem. If you’re selling five, 10, $15, turn and burn products that nobody has to think about and you want to get that machine running, then paid obviously makes a lot of sense.

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If you’re selling window installs or large ticket items where people are taking a lot of time to make a decision, you better have really good shit on your social media channels because people are betting you out.

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They’re validating. They want to know that you’re a subject matter expert or what you do differently and you need the whole goal is to kind of get their attention, but then also hold that attention by putting cool shit out that increases the likelihood of them wanting to consider you for that larger purchase.

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Yeah, that’s a great point. I mean, obviously, the more expensive the product or service, the more trust that needs to be built. Yeah. And then the last, the last thing is the questions is budget.

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So what is, what’s the budget that people have that you’re starting with? And if you have a limited budget, but you have time, organics a great place to start.

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There’s a lot of things you can do there. There’s a lot of groups that you can get into Reddit threads that you can be of value, not spammy, but you can be a value and answer people and you can get in front of people that way.

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If you do have budget and you need that speed. If you got a need for speed, what movie was that in? Is that copy?
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I’ve got it. Oh my God. How is like the more most iconic movie ever? If you’ve got a need for speed.
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That’s the way to go.

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So those are the three questions we usually ask. So again, to reframe those ones one more time. Question one, what’s the primary goal? Question two, what’s the timeline? Number three, what is the budget?
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So if you need leads yesterday, paid your answer. If you’re playing the long game, organic builds the foundation and makes paid work better.

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So let’s give some real scenarios here and talk about some of the things that we’ve seen in real life. So, so I think something that is also overlooked is that if it’s not all or nothing one or the other.

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So when we’re talking about paid advertising, you still need ad creative and that’s where organic is going to come into the picture. So typically for what we do, organic is the more time heavy activity or deliverable.

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And that’s because so much goes into the creative for the content. But then that helps us save time when it comes to the creative for advertising because we’re basically having the ads team pick and choose from this content library.

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The best that would work in advertising. So if you are a startup and you only have budget for organic content for now, you don’t have the budget to spend on advertising.

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Just know that you are building a library of possible ad creative to use later than the line when maybe you do have money for advertising and then you can kind of see what works best with your audience and your following without spending too much money.

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I think most of the companies that that are successful in social media have an understanding that you kind of need both, you know, I mean you can throw money at paid and kind of get some things going but if you’re really serious about growing and scaling a business, you have to have a plan around putting out
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good, great content consistently that and that doesn’t mean it has to be every day. And it doesn’t mean that you have to, there’s not one solution to that like either you have people internally that can help you navigate that and create that or you
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got to go out and get some help with that. One way or another though, I think the most successful agency relationships are the ones where as a client, you’re still an active participant, you know you’re still the subject matter expert and you’re still involved in the
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business and the best analogy to make it was just like putting fuel in a car, the car’s not going to run if you don’t, you constantly have to invest in putting fuel in a car for it to run.

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Same thing with social, you have to continuously put things out there and always think quality over quantity, you know, there used to be differing opinions, you know you’ll get Gary Veeves is traditionally said, you know, posts all
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the time, every day, and that’s not realistic, you know, most small business, that’s not going to happen. Take more time, do good shit, and you know put it out consistently, maybe that’s once or twice a week, whatever it is, as long as it’s great.

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And it’s a good reflection of what you do and separates you from the pack. Those things are the things that are inevitably going to build, you know, an audience that is passionate about what you do and is going to buy from you frequently or
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others, you know, so you got it, you have to keep at it. Nice. I like that little Gary Veeves call out there. Are you challenging Gary? Should we, should Gary come on the pod here?

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If it’s up to Gary, everybody would be posting, you know, three or five times a day, but it’s just not, you know, not everybody’s wired like that, you know, time, lack of expertise, whatever.
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Yeah, it’s tough. I mean, clearly Gary knows what he’s doing.

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Yeah, you can only do so much with your own personal sources. And hey, it’s always progress over perfection, right? Crawl Walk Run.

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It’s better to put out a couple of pieces of great content, rather than not do it at all. So, you know, get in the game, have fun with it, low barrier to entry and, you know, and then do your thing.

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So in closing, if you’re not sure what path is the right path for your business, that’s exactly what discovery is for. You need to go in, have a real look and talk with your internal team, figure out where you guys are as far as your primary goal, as far as your timeline
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and as far as your budget goes, and that’ll really be the North Star to help guide you towards the correct answer of, would you, would you, should you, could you, could you, would you should you do organic or paid or paid an organic.
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Tell me how that works out for you.

• The answer to “should I start with organic or paid social media?” depends entirely on three things: your primary goal, your timeline, and your budget — there is no universal right answer.
• Organic social media builds brand awareness, trust, and community over time — but it takes 6–12 months to gain real traction, so patience is non-negotiable.
• Paid social media delivers speed and targeting precision, but only when it’s run properly through an ads manager — boosting posts is not the same thing and rarely delivers real results.
• If you need leads or sales in the next 30–90 days, paid is your answer. If you’re playing the long game and building a brand that lasts, start with organic.
• Organic content and paid ads aren’t competing strategies — your organic content library becomes your ad creative library, saving time and money when you’re ready to scale.
• The most successful businesses on social media commit to both eventually — organic builds the foundation that makes paid work better, and paid amplifies the organic content that already resonates.
• Quality always beats quantity — posting once or twice a week with intention and craft will outperform daily posts that nobody cares about.