Let’s say you are a brand. And let’s say, for fun, that you’ve hired a social-media-slash-digital agency to help your brand grow and prosper on the vast interweb. You want people to come to your website, check out your tweets, like and share your Facebook updates and eventually, buy your product or service from your online store. Your social-media-slash-digital agency promises you all these things and more, and starts your online campaign. They throw acronyms at you like SEO, SEM, SMM, TG, ER, CPC, CPM, CPA, CPF, and a million others. You are sufficiently impressed with their jargon and you approve a certain budget to spend on these acronyms. A month or two later, your sales haven’t moved, but your agency comes back to you with large smiles and tells you that your brand has achieved an impressive ‘organic’ growth and it’s only a matter of time that the sales start rolling in. Don’t fall for this swindle.

To be fair, it’s not completely the agency’s fault; it’s the kind of world we live in right now. But I’ll get to that a bit later. When someone says any of the following things to you, they are bullshitting you:

1. Our organic reach is x Million.
2. We are trending organically on Twitter!
3. There’s a difference between ‘organic’ and ‘paid’ reach.

There is no such thing as organic growth anymore. At least for brands on social media. If you are paying a bunch of people to tweet to you, and if this is a fairly large bunch, and you happen to get listed as one of the trending topics of the day on Twitter, it’s not considered an ‘organic trend’. If you pay for ads on Facebook and your ad is shown to 10 people, then your so called ‘organic’ reach is automatically the total number of friends these 10 people have.

If there is money going out for a particular activity on digital, the returns you get for that activity aren’t organic. This is the fantasy that exists in the industry today. This trend was probably introduced as a way to placate the dinosaurial marketing managers who are stuck in the cusp of today’s intangible ‘reach’ and ‘engagement’ and yesterday’s TRPs and ‘press clippings’. If you tell a guy that he’s getting more bang for his buck, he’s always happy.

Social media marketing, today, has become a numbers game. And the only number that counts, is unfortunately, the amount of money that’s being spent. Very few brands have managed to achieve true organic growth, and this has taken them years of perseverance and hard work.

This is just me – one person’s opinion – on this trend. What do you think? Give me your opinions in the comments section