Thread by @mixesintheattic

Organic social media is a complete waste of time for 98% of brands.

No matter how good your content is, it will never be able to reach enough people to have a significant impact on your business.

I can prove this using napkin math (1/n)

Let’s assume an average SaaS brand in the US market that sells B2C and B2B.

Their customer base: online businesses and shoppers in the USA.

Their main social platform: Twitter

At first glance, Twitter has great potential for reaching their audience. It has 48.35 million active accounts in the US, with ~42% of those accounts active daily.

That’s 21.5% of all online shoppers in the States - not bad!

Now, we must size out the market and dig a little deeper...

(I show you how to research and segment a market here)

linkedin.com/pulse/how-mark…

The US population is 328.2 million people.

~225 million Americans shopped online in 2019.

There are also 1.8 million online businesses in the US.

Their market segmentation looks something like this:

Remember, we are targeting both Social Shoppers & Social Shops (48.8 million ppl)

According to @brandwatch, the avg. twitter account has 707 followers - roughly 0.001% of the total market.

But this is a SaaS company with a social team, so I’ll be generous and say they have x15 more followers than average.

That’s 10,600 followers - just 0.02% of shoppers and shops with a Twitter account.

They’ll need to grow their social following fast in order to raise awareness and sales in a meaningful way.

But what’s a realistic goal?

Let’s say their social team kills it and gets to 1 million followers in a year - a 7900% increase!

That’s still only 0.44% of the total market, and 2% of all online businesses and shoppers with Twitter accounts.

For context, look at huge companies like Apple (4.6m followers) and Google (22.1m followers).

Even Google is only reaching 9.8% of American online shoppers organically.

You'll notice that Apple doesn't bother with organic tweeting at all...

Even by growing their following by 7900%, most companies can only raise awareness in their target segments by max 2% using organic social media.

You will never reach 98% of your target audience, no matter how good your content is.

This is why paid social is so, so important.

You cannot rely on organic social media to move the needle in a meaningful way. It’s like bringing a squirt gun to a forest fire.

The numbers don’t change significantly for Instagram, Facebook, or any other social channel.

If you want to grow, stop wasting your time with organic posting and focus on paid social.

Pro tip: @bebornsocial has the best presentation I’ve ever seen on how brands should use (paid) social to grow their business.

Read it. Internalize it. And start growing your business.
docs.google.com/presentation/d…

So this is taking off...

If you want more tips on being a better marketer, check out my book. It costs as much as a fancy coffee, but delivers much more satisfaction ;)
gumroad.com/l/how-to-avoid…

Article version of this thread here if anyone wants a bookmark 👇
ianbarnard.ca/post/stop-wast…