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Paid reach.

Dear brands and custodians thereof:

It's probably quite true that organic reach is (almost) dead. I've seen it in action: corporate Facebook posts just don't get a lot of traction. No matter how well-written they are, or how engaging the accompanying visuals / videos / whatnots are. And the same holds true for other posts.

So I totally understand why you'd want to pay money to promote your posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and feature your videos using TrueView on YouTube. Or invest in PPC (even though it looks so ugly).

Still: don't put your money behind mediocre, or even bad content.

It just makes you look worse.

I'm not going to name and shame, but there are so many brands that put money behind not especially engaging content (to say nothing of its aesthetic merit).

So my point is: Make sure you have good content before pushing it out. With well-crafted words and effective visuals. And these need to be underwritten by strong ideas and creative concepts.

Because at the end, it's the underlying concepts that matter.

Update after watching Tara Reed's video Twitter Deep Dive: How to Use Social Media to 10x Your Website Traffic, where she recommends the following:
A 14-day experiment [...] when you take your top blog posts and for 14 days, every single day you post 14 posts, different blog posts. You can mix them up. But every day you are posting 14 links to a blog post with some interesting, unique content. The reason you want to do this is that the average user spends just 13 minutes on Twitter at a time. So the chances of them seeing more than one of those posts in your day is really slim. So you want to do 14. It may feel like a lot for your company and for your brand, but really that's where you want to be in order to really squeeze out all that value on your social media site.

Please just don't. The abundance of posts will make your own Twitter feed look spammy, and don't forget that some poor social media exec will have to write out all the permutations of tweets promoting the same blog post in oh-so-many different ways (also, "to 10x" doesn't really hold up grammatically). Just put a little bit of money behind it and see how your target audiences react to what you put out.

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