Subscribe to our newsletter to receive business tips, learn about new funding programmes, join upcoming events, take e-learning courses, and more.
Take the first step to successfully starting and growing your business.
Join for freePosted: Fri 4th Sep 2026
Can businesses still grow successfully through organic social media, or has social become a pay-to-play environment?
If you start investing in paid reach, what does that mean for your organic performance?
In this practical Lunch and Learn, Rebecca Hopwood, founder of Youbee Media, explores how organic and paid social media actually work together, the different jobs they do, and when investing in advertising can help accelerate your growth.
We look at the foundations businesses should have in place before spending money on ads, why paying for more reach won't necessarily fix content that isn't working, and how to decide where your time and marketing budget will have the greatest impact.
Leave with a clearer understanding of when to focus on organic, when paid social makes sense and how to build an approach that uses both strategically – without feeling like you have to pay every time you want your business to be seen.
The different roles of organic and paid social media
When it makes sense to start investing in paid social
How to decide where to invest your time and budget
Rebecca is the founder of Youbee Media, a Leeds-based marketing agency helping businesses build stronger brands through social media, content and strategic marketing support.
With over 15 years' experience in marketing, sales and business development, Rebecca works with businesses of all sizes to make marketing feel more practical, purposeful and achievable.
Alongside running Youbee Media, she regularly delivers social media and marketing workshops for business owners, entrepreneurs and students, helping people understand not just what to do, but why they're doing it.
Watch more expert webinars
Access a growing collection of expert-led webinars covering marketing, sales, finance, growth and more – ready whenever you are.
Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona, and I'll be your host today. For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for startups and small businesses.
I'm pleased to introduce Rebecca Hopwood, who is the founder of UB Media. In this session, Rebecca will explore how organic and paid social media work together, the different jobs they do, and when investing in advertising can help accelerate your growth.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. Today's webinar will be recorded, and we'll send a follow-up email with the recording and further resources later today. Over to you, Rebecca.
Rebecca Hopwood: Thank you very much, and thank you to everybody joining me today. We're going to be going through organic versus paid social media, and trying to understand what we should be doing, how often, and whether there are any patterns or rules to follow.
This topic came from what people have been asking me. Founders and clients we work with often ask whether organic reach is dead, whether they have to pay to get seen, whether running ads will hurt their organic reach, and how much they should actually be spending.
There isn't a clear answer to any of those questions, and social media platforms won't give you an impartial one either, because they make money when you advertise. When you go to post on Facebook, you'll often see a recommendation to boost the post, nudging you to think it's crucial for the post's success. The same thing happens on TikTok and other platforms.
In terms of organic reach, what's actually happening? Organic reach isn't dead, but it is harder. It's becoming more competitive, which makes it less predictable.
Social media platforms are becoming more like recommendation engines, so the way algorithms work and the way we use those platforms is changing. Organic content can be discovered by people who don't follow you at all, particularly through platforms like TikTok or content like Reels, which increasingly rely on algorithmic feeds.
Organic still offers discovery, but the challenge is that you don't control distribution in the same way you do with advertising. Organic doesn't mean you're reaching everyone who follows you, and you shouldn't limit yourself to that audience either.
Successful organic content – unpaid content published to your feed – should reach a percentage of your existing audience and a percentage of new audiences all the time. Certain formats help with this: reels, video content and carousels on Instagram tend to get recommended into people's feeds more than a static post or graphic.
The key is to use your organic platform to test different formats, and to think about your customer when you're publishing to your feed – who they are and what they want.
The myth is that if you start paying for reach, your organic content will suffer. The reality is there's no basis for this and no evidence to show it; it's an assumption that TikTok or Meta might suppress your organic posts intentionally once you've become an influencer.
Paid reach can disguise weak organic performance, and that's actually the most important point. If you stop looking at what works organically because you're paying to distribute everything, you lose useful information about what people genuinely respond to.
This is where the myth comes from. People started paying for reach, content did well, and when they stopped paying, organic content didn't carry the same momentum. But that's often because we weren't looking closely enough at the organic metrics and became too reliant on the paid budget.
This is because organic and paid have different jobs. Organic content should focus on building trust, testing ideas, showing your brand's personality, building community and learning what resonates with your audience.
Use your organic platform to test, measure and refine who your audience is, what they like and what they respond to. When you pay to boost that content, reach new audiences or promote it, you're essentially increasing distribution.
Paid can help you reach defined audiences, retarget campaigns, drive action and scale what works. The key thing is that organic builds; paid amplifies.
When you start paying to reach new audiences, it's because you've already built trust, tested ideas and know what resonates with your community. If you pay before that groundwork is done, you might increase distribution but not necessarily reach the right audience.
So before you spend a single pound on advertising, ask yourself: who are you trying to reach? What do they care about? Which messages will resonate, and what do you want them to do?
This is one of the biggest barriers to feeling that a campaign has been successful. You might spend money promoting content because it's fun, something you're proud of, or something you think will be highly engaging.
But if you don't know who's going to care about it, who the audience is, and what action you want them to take, you may well feel unfulfilled when the campaign ends, because you didn't set out with a clear goal. If you can't answer these questions, spending money probably isn't the answer yet.
Go back to what organic and paid content each do, and how they build trust with your audience. That way, you know who you're trying to reach, what they care about, and what will resonate.
Paid social makes sense when you want to reach beyond your existing audience, you know who that audience is, you have a campaign or objective in mind, you've found messaging or a creative that resonates, and you have somewhere useful to send people so you can measure the result.
When you pay for social media reach or content, it should accelerate something, not rescue it. That specific campaign objective means you have a clear goal and key message in mind, which stops you from sporadically boosting posts just because social media suggests it.
Having a campaign in mind gives you the perspective to look at a piece of content you want to boost or advertise, and to consider what's happening organically to back it up. If you're driving traffic to your feed because you're paying for people to see, find, follow or engage with you, think about what they'll see when they land there organically.
If that's your page, because you want more followers or engagement, that organic content needs to be strong enough to keep compounding trust – showing what your community is, who it's for, and sharing your message. If you're sending people to a landing page or sign-up form, that page needs to be right; otherwise, your bounce rate will be high because visitors won't see something that matches the ad.
Think of it as a mini campaign with an objective in mind, which makes you consider the full customer journey. If you pay, what do they see organically? Where does that lead, and where can you send them on the website? You want the whole experience to make sense to the customer, and for it to make sense at the end if you're going to pay for anything.
So, we've got a £500 question. You've got some money, and you're happy to spend it, and you think social media could be a good place to invest. Where do you put it?
There are a few different options: you could put £500 behind Meta ads or another platform; you could put £500 towards creating better content, such as outsourcing to a graphic designer or getting professional photography done; you could use a mix of creating and then amplifying content; or you could put it somewhere different entirely.
The key thing when it comes to paying for any kind of ads or social media activity is that you're prepared and happy to invest that money. So, if we've got that in mind, let's look at the options.
The answer isn't clear-cut, and it depends on where your business is now, what your goals are, and what you've already learned. If you're a new business with solid core assets, investing in better content could win: it might mean that when you do start advertising, you look sharp, polished and professional.
If you've got great e-commerce creative with a proven product, you might want to put your budget behind ads – amplifying something that's already performing well. If you're a service-based business or an established consultant with high value, organic content on LinkedIn is likely to work better, because building your organic presence is what matters most there.
If your website is poor, with little thought behind the customer journey, and people land without knowing what to do next, you need to fix that first: spend your £500 on your website, imagery, messaging and landing page, so the journey makes sense for anyone who lands there.
If your website and customer journey are already solid, you might want to spend £500 working with an influencer instead. When I deliver talks on social media to businesses and startups, I think that influencer budget should always form part of the question.
With £500, you don't have to just promote content on TikTok or boost posts on Facebook. You could collaborate with a local business, content creator or influencer to create good-quality content that helps you get found by other audiences. It's the same goal: reaching new people who wouldn't find you otherwise, by tapping into somebody else's audience.
So there's no magic split, and no single approach that works for everyone, whether you're just starting out or already established. It's about thinking: where are you now? Where do you feel strong? How well does your audience know you, and how well have you joined everything up so it all makes sense? You don't want to pay to magnify a problem.
Say you've achieved 25,000 impressions on social media, with 700 engagements leading to 240 website visits, but zero enquiries. Is this the time to spend more money? Not yet.
We need to think about fixing this first. You might have found a formula where your content is being seen: lots of reels or trend-based content, great impressions, high engagement, and people responding to it. But are they the right people? Maybe not, if you've had zero enquiries off the back of it.
Investigate who's seeing it, what message they're seeing, how it's being interpreted, what the offer is, and whether it lands with what your audience expects. Look at your call to action, your landing page and your customer journey; you've done the hard work to reach 25,000 people and get great engagement, so don't lose them at the last stage because the call to action isn't right.
Don't leave this all up to the customer. If your final call to action is "get in touch if you'd like to know more", think about what more you can do to be proactive, so people don't leave without you making the most of that engagement, whether that's a free download or sending them to another page to become part of something. Consider what action your audience is likely to take, and how you can maximise the result.
This is the shift: rather than thinking about how much to spend on organic or paid, shift your thinking so your budget follows the objective. If you're a startup or new business, this is the time to learn, test and establish yourself: to learn who your audience is, what they like, what resonates, where you fit, and how they respond.
Test different formats – carousels, reels, static posts, articles – and use that testing to establish yourself and build trust organically. If you're a professional services business, your authority, relationships and selective amplification are key: show that you're an expert and trustworthy, build a relationship by speaking directly to your audience, and showcase evidence at every step.
If you're an established e-commerce business, your content should be the engine for finding new audiences: strong products, images and photography, leading to stronger paid acquisition once you understand what your audience does when they land on your website.
This is why, when you see posts online saying you should spend 70% of your budget on organic and 30% on paid, it's worth asking: 70% of what, for which business, and to try and achieve what? At different times in your business, you'll have different objectives, and it's the data that should guide you.
That's the best thing about social media and digital marketing: you can see consistently how things are working, what's working well, and what needs more attention, through both organic and paid activity. Keep testing, learning and growing.
How do you know if it's working? This is where the numbers help. If your objective is awareness, look for high reach, a good number of views, video watch time and brand searches.
You know you've nailed it if people are actively searching for your brand. TikTok is particularly good for this: its advertising tools show you what people search for and how they found your content, whether that's searching for a type of product and stumbling across you, or searching for your brand name directly.
If you're trying to grow awareness, you want reach to be as high as possible. Video watch time helps you understand how engaged your audience is: if everyone drops off after the first second, you're doing a good job with awareness, but they're not sticking around to find out who you are.
If your objective is engagement or building community, look at comments, shares, saves and DMs – anything that suggests someone is likely to come back to your content later, because that's valuable information. If the objective is website traffic, look at clicks, landing page visits and engaged sessions.
Check whether you've got a high or low bounce rate, and whether people are clicking, and how often, to understand whether that looks good or bad. A post reaching 50,000 people isn't necessarily more successful than one reaching 2,000; it depends on what you wanted those people to do.
All you need is customers: sign-ups, people willing to pay you, people who become a client, refer you or remember you. You don't need 50,000 people for that; you need 2,000 of the right ones.
I've just published an article with Enterprise Nation on a similar theme, about why going viral isn't the key to success. Going viral can be brilliant, and we saw that with the impressions and views in the earlier example, but if you get nothing from it, it's far better to get 2,000 actions from the right people.
Build your marketing system: it starts with a strategy, moves through to your content (a combination of organic and paid, with no fixed rule for when you need to start paying), and then you measure the results. That measurement feeds back into your strategy, which then supports your content, and you keep doing what works.
The system isn't strategy, content, organic, paid, measure, finished; you're learning every time you do something. It's about using your strategy to build your content, distribute it to the right people, measure what happens, and use that data to adjust your strategy and repeat.
Then the question stops being "should we do organic or paid?" and becomes "what combination will help us achieve the objective?", because you have the objective in mind. You don't have to pay to grow, but paid can help you grow faster once you know what you're amplifying.
You build something worth seeing, learn what your audience responds to, and then pay to put the right things in front of the right people at the right moment. Organic and paid content will support your strategy at different times, but it all starts with that strategy.
You don't need a huge budget, but you do need to be prepared to test things at a level that gives you useful information. If you spend £500 once, never do anything again, and have a terrible experience, that's money you've said goodbye to; think about what it meant, what it did, and how you'll change things next time so it performs better.
That's a whistle-stop tour through the organic versus paid social media argument. Really, the idea is to get you thinking about that combination: whether you've never done paid before, when the right time might be, and why you'd do it. I don't know if we've got any questions.
Caitriona: Thanks, Rebecca. If anyone has any questions, please do put them into the chat.
Let's start with this question from Demissi: "I have been using organic and paid advertising on social media for many years, and I haven't observed any change. All of my customers come from person-to-person referrals developed during marketing campaigns. What do you recommend I change?"
Rebecca: Are you saying what you've been doing so far is all on Meta platforms? The question didn't specify, so I'll assume it's Meta, given how long this has been going on.
We don't know exactly what level of ads you've been running, but this data is telling us something isn't quite landing with the right audience. If you're currently just boosting posts organically and then paying to put them in front of new audiences, it might be worth switching to Facebook Ads Manager.
That way, you can run more targeted promotions: building an ad from scratch that doesn't sit on your feed and isn't seen by your existing audience, but goes directly to the people you want to reach. That's one extra level that can help you get seen by new people.
If you've been doing this for some time and have good data, and you're using a pixel tracking code on Facebook, you can run a retargeting ad to find lookalike audiences: people similar to your existing audience, but new. There are different tools you can use to take that data and find more new people, excluding those who've already seen and responded, and set up lookalike audiences instead.
You can do similar things on LinkedIn, and TikTok lets you run targeted ads too, though I don't think it yet supports lookalike audiences in the same way. Even for a lookalike audience, you can upload your own data; there are a few different options, and it comes down to the level of ad strategy you've already got.
Caitriona: Thank you. Frankie is asking: how should I determine how much I should spend on paid marketing?
Rebecca: That depends on your budget, your ambitions and the platform, but let's try to find a general rule of thumb. If you're running a targeted ad on Facebook, not a boosted post, you'd probably need at least £75 to £100 to run a two-week campaign. We wouldn't usually run just one two-week campaign in isolation; there'll usually be a follow-up, such as a retargeting campaign.
That's a good place to start from. As a boost, something like £30 to £50 for a week should get good results on Facebook and Instagram. On TikTok, I'd suggest three to five days at a similar budget, around £30 to £50.
LinkedIn advertising tends to be more expensive: think a minimum of around £8 to £10 per day, depending on your audience and expectations. I wouldn't spend a lot of money boosting things that don't drive revenue or income.
Boosting can be good for amplifying a post about your product, service or offering when you just want more people to see it; that can have a lower or middle-of-the-road budget compared to something more targeted and strategic, where you can measure conversion and return. Once you know that someone will pay you £10, but it costs you £3 to get that lead, you'll understand where to spend more money.
Caitriona: Thank you. Missy's asking if it's possible to get the video presentation; just to confirm, this session is being recorded, and we'll share the recording with everyone afterwards.
Then we have a question from Leo, which is a bit more specific: what's the best strategy for a new business targeting the manufacturing and automotive industry?
Rebecca: That depends on your platform, and who you're trying to reach and why. For that kind of industry, your audience might be on LinkedIn or on Meta; the key is thinking about how they use each platform and how you're going to appear there.
How your audience uses LinkedIn to find services and businesses like yours will be different to how they use Facebook or Instagram. In the evening, they're more likely to be scrolling through Facebook or Instagram, so your content there needs to be a little lighter and softer – but your organic content still needs to be strong, so that when people do land on your page, they find what they're looking for.
Groups are a good way to find audiences in niche sectors if you know exactly who your audience is and what journey they're likely to take. Engaging in Facebook groups, or sharing in local community or interest groups, can help people find you without needing to pay for it. Just think about which platform you're using, what you expect your audience to do there, and make it specific to that platform.
Caitriona: Do you think businesses can still achieve significant growth through organic social media alone, or is some level of paid investment becoming essential?
Rebecca: Really good question. I wouldn't say an immediate yes or no, but I do think it's possible; you need to be creative and a little bold. Doing it organically alone, you will see growth, and it will be measurable and visible, but you need to test different types of content and different messaging.
If you haven't done AB testing before, changing one thing within an organic or paid post and seeing what difference it makes is worth trying. You don't need to record metrics every single time you post, but you do need to keep an eye on what the numbers mean and how people are responding.
Be prepared to try reels, carousels, static posts and articles, and build up trust with a strong website. If you measure your results over six to 12 months, you'll see organic growth.
Because you're already testing, learning and gathering data, six months in could be a good time to invest in some paid activity; not because you have to, but because you know what works. If you've been growing steadily by 10 to 15 followers a month, you might get 50 new followers through paid activity, and a paid audience landing on your feed for the first time will see that you're already good at engaging your audience, building trust and telling your story.
So there's a lot you can do organically, but once you've got that foundation and confidence in it, a bit of budget behind it can be a nice reward: a sign that your hard work is paying off, because you already know what you're doing.
Caitriona: Thank you. We're coming to the end of the session now, but we have time for one final question: what misconceptions do businesses have about the relationship between organic and paid social?
Rebecca: One of the biggest misconceptions with organic is that if you've got an audience, they're going to see your content; that isn't true. Just because someone follows your account or page, or is connected to you in some way, it doesn't mean they'll see everything you post.
Social media algorithms support content that speaks to interested audiences, because the algorithm's job is to keep people on the platform for as long as possible by showing them content they're likely to react to. If you're not thinking about your audience or the quality of what you're posting, there's a high chance nobody will see it, even if you've got 10,000 followers; you need to get that right first.
Another common misconception is that having a constant ad running is key to success. It isn't, because you don't want to get complacent with a consistent daily budget that just sends your messages out without checking what's working. You need to keep looking at what's changing, what's working and how your audience is responding; you need to stay present in your feed to keep doing enough of the right things.
Caitriona: Thank you, that's great advice, and a good place to leave the session. Thank you so much for your presentation, Rebecca, and thanks to everyone who joined us today. We'll be sharing the recording and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon.
Rebecca: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Unlock more on-demand sessions designed to help you sharpen your skills, grow your business and stay one step ahead. Find more Lunch and Learn webinars
