Paid, Owned & Earned Media. What’s the difference?
Social Media is more than meets the eye. Besides impressions, engagement, likes, and comments, marketers always pay attention to what’s behind these metrics. As I mentioned in my past article, marketers and business owners should dedicate their time and energy to drive organic reach and stay away from fake followers. There are so many other ways to increase your social media presence and drive real engagement. This takes us to today’s topic. Paid, Owned and Earned Media. Let’s find out what these mean and how can you use them in your best advantage.
Paid Media
All the major platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter provide you with this option. Either you want more followers, advertise a product or just increase brand awareness, you can start a paid campaign on any social media platform. The first step is to decide which type of campaign you want to start. Where do you want to drive leads? On your profile or your website? Depending on your budget and the length of the campaign, you will get an estimated reach number provided automatically by the social media platform. If you are satisfied with the prediction, this will be the first metric you will need to monitor. At the end of the campaign, the reach metric will represent the top layer of your campaign funnel. The wider the top layer, the bigger the sales your funnel will generate. A paid media campaign is not difficult to implement or conduct. However, always track the metrics and analyze the results to make sure you are not throwing money out the window.
Owned Media
To put it simply, owned media can be defined as the results you achieve when you dedicate time and effort in growing your social media presence. Effort means to build a strong feed, with quality content and good storytelling. It’s not an easy task to build a quality social media account. It needs a lot of planning. Starting with the theme of your account, the amount of content you post, the story you are telling, your target audience and even posting schedule, are all part of a big plan called the Content Calendar. A social media specialist without a content calendar it’s like a warrior without its armor. Of course, all the effort you are putting in this is time-consuming. The time that you need to dedicate to engaging and interacting with your audience. The fastest way to increase your owned media it’s to be a part of your audience’s life. Interact with your audience as many times as you can. Liking and commenting is always recommended. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and be honest. If the popular restaurant across the street just liked your recent post, would you be curious to visit the profile that just interacted with you out of the blue? This is real brand awareness.
Earned Media
Digital media is giving marketers new ways to interact with consumers. Social media is one of them. Paid, owned and earned media can’t be sorted by importance. They are all equally important. How much time, money and effort you dedicate to each of them is a question that each brand will have to figure out judging by the target audience they want to reach.