Demystifying Social Media
Social media is powerful. It’s doing multiple jobs at once. It builds awareness. It helps validate purchase decisions. It supports sales. It keeps the brand visible. It gives customers a place to engage, complain, ask questions, and feel heard.
Social media can also be a money pit. It devours time, money, and effort faster than almost any other channel. Between managing the community, producing content, running ads, working with creators, handling affiliates, and keeping up with how users are using the channel, social can quickly and quietly become one of the most expensive marketing line items.
We’ve been driving wins on social since Facebook introduced the Like button in 2009. Over that time, one thing has become obvious: social media is full of bad advice and broken expectations. And when brand leaders buy into it, they waste time, burn budget, and make decisions that hurt growth.
To address this, we’re introducing a new social media content series where we’ll bring you straight talk about the channel and what you need to know to grow your business.
Knowing Which Road Actually Makes Sense for Your Brand
Let’s set the record straight on social media strategy.
If you’re a startup or emerging brand on a tight budget, picking the right social media strategy could be your road to riches, while the wrong one could be a fatal error. If you’re a mid-sized or enterprise brand, picking the right one could be the key to finally seeing value from social media.
That’s where most brands get stuck.
Too often, brands fixate on three primary paths to driving sales on social media: organic (aka “viral”), influencers, and paid ads.
“If we can have something go viral, we won’t need to spend as much money.”
For as long as social has existed, there’s been an underlying belief that an organic viral hit is where the magic happens. It’s also been hyped by marketing professionals looking to make a buck (looking at you again, Gary V.).
The dream scenario is familiar. Make a video that hits. It spreads. People follow. Engagement spikes. Sales roll in.
So teams chase it with stunts, hooks, trends, and posting schedules. Views, likes, and follower growth become the scoreboard. When lightning strikes, it feels great. When it doesn’t, internal debates begin about what content would actually go viral.
“If we can just crack our ROAS on social, the money we spend will come back tenfold.”
Instead of chasing one or two viral videos, ads are developed, launched, and paid for. The team is still playing with hooks, edits, and creative, but they’re also working with targeting, budgets, and creative testing.
Success isn’t measured by likes, views, or followers. The dashboard is built around cost per click, conversion rate, return on ad spend, and other KPIs. If a campaign doesn’t move the needle, the team can start testing creative, targeting, products, and budgets.
“If we can just get others to talk about us on social, we won’t need to spend money on ads.”
Getting the right people talking about your brand requires finding, filtering, and managing influencers. While commission-based sales models are becoming more common (looking at you, TikTok Shop), many influencers still require upfront payment.
Those costs fluctuate as influencer fatigue comes and goes. Engagement and sales data can help evaluate performance, but if one influencer doesn’t drive results, it’s often difficult to pinpoint why. And if one does perform, the next question becomes: how scalable is it?
Nothing’s Free
One thing must be clear: none of these avenues is free, or even low-cost.
While most people understand that paid ads cost money, many still assume viral marketing and influencers are cheap or free.
Going Viral Is Not Free
In our experience, brands insisting on “going viral” are often trying not to spend money. As a result, the content they produce tends to be low-cost and reactive.
What becomes costly is the time wasted chasing the win.
A real-world example: a spirits brand that has spent the last two years cycling through different “outrageous” content themes. None of them builds toward a cohesive brand connection with their target audience. None has come close to going viral. All of them make the brand look disjointed, self-obsessed, and unfunny.
The loss of momentum in brand building is impossible to calculate, especially in a category facing declining sales and intense competition.
Influencers Are Not Free
The CEO of Vital Proteins once bragged that the company’s meteoric growth through influencer marketing was “free.” To support the claim, he shared that they hired six full-time employees to manage influencer outreach.
Assuming each was paid $60,000 per year, that’s $360,000 annually in salaries alone. Add influencer fees on top of that. The influencers who actually move the needle are expensive. Today, four-figure fees per post are common, with additional costs for whitelisting or licensing content for paid use.
So What’s Right for Your Brand? Where Is the Smart Money Going?
Should I Be Doing Paid Social?
There are many reasons why paid social makes sense if you want to grow sales reliably, predictably, and at scale.
It’s targeted
Paid social lets you aim directly at real buyers, demographically, behaviorally, and psychographically. No praying to the algorithm gods. No hoping your post shows up organically. No uncertainty about whether viewers even live in markets where your product is sold.
It’s testable
Want to know which headline performs better? Which video holds attention? Which call to action drives action? Paid social allows you to find out quickly.
It’s timely
Organic content gets put into the feed and shown to people based on the algorithm. People who’ve engaged with your posts the most will get priority. It’s guesswork on if and when that content reaches the right new people who will both take it viral and buy your product. Paid ads start pushing content to your target nearly immediately after the platform reviews and approves them (typically within 24 hours).
To be clear, paid ads can still take time to deliver actionable results. New advertising accounts or new markets may take up to 60 days for the algorithm to fully optimize. But, you can see their progress in real time.
It scales without breaking
When something works with paid ads, you add fuel. When something works organically, you got lucky. And luck is hard to repeat. How many brands have you seen pull off the same viral hit twice?
What Experience Has Shown
As an agency that has worked primarily with early-stage and emerging brands since 2009, we’ve had a front-row seat to hundreds of social media successes and failures.
From that experience, we can say a few things with certainty:
- Your mentor was right. You learn more from failures than successes.
- A dozen or more brands committed fully to a viral-first strategy. Not one successfully scaled from it. Some are still trying. Others have shut down.
- Influencers can work, but not in a vacuum.
- Paid ads have proven to be the most effective and efficient way to scale, but they also struggle when used alone.
Bottom line: The most successful approach we’ve seen uses paid social as the foundation. It creates repeatable patterns that can be scaled. That doesn’t mean paid is the only lever being pulled. The strongest brands use every lever they can afford, but they build around paid social.
Stay tuned or subscribe to our newsletter for the next post in this series, where we’ll break down the other social media levers worth pulling.
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