Social Media Marketing
Social MediaAlso: Social Marketing · SMM
Quick definition
Social media marketing is using social platforms to build awareness, attract customers and retain an audience. It covers both organic activity (posting, engaging, building a following without paying for distribution) and paid social (buying reach, clicks and conversions through platform advertising). The two activities require different skills and are measured differently.
How it varies across Australia
Across the Australian businesses we see, paid social outperforms organic on direct acquisition metrics but organic builds the credibility that makes paid work harder. Businesses running paid social with no organic presence often find their costs rise as audiences become less familiar with the brand. The two tracks reinforce each other more than they compete.
See social media performance patterns across Australian industries →Organic vs paid: the two tracks
Content posted without paying for distribution. Reach depends on the algorithm and your existing audience.
Advertising bought through the platform. Reach is purchased and targetable. Results are measurable.
Responding, moderating and engaging with followers and comments. Part of organic, but often treated separately.
Paying or partnering with third-party accounts to reach their audiences. Sits between organic and paid.
What it actually means
Social media marketing gets talked about as one thing. It's really two different jobs that happen to share a platform.
Organic social is the discipline of building an audience, earning attention and staying visible without buying it. The skills are editorial: knowing what your audience cares about, producing content consistently, understanding how each platform's algorithm rewards behaviour. Organic reach has declined across most major platforms over the past decade. Facebook and Instagram surface organic business content to a fraction of your followers by default. LinkedIn is slightly more generous. TikTok is the one platform where genuine organic distribution still exists at scale, but even that is shifting.
Paid social is a direct-response advertising channel. You buy impressions, clicks and conversions. The skills are media-buying: creative testing, audience segmentation, bid management, attribution. Paid social works whether you have an organic following or not. The creative assets happen to live on social platforms but the logic is identical to display advertising.
The confusion between the two leads to bad decisions. Teams with a strong content instinct try to run paid campaigns like organic posts and wonder why they don't convert. Teams with a performance background treat their organic feed like a low-budget ad channel and wonder why no one engages.
Both tracks are legitimate. They serve different goals and require different people.
Most businesses post on social and call it a strategy. A strategy has a platform logic, a content brief and a way to know if it's working.
How it shows up
Organic social shows up in reach, impressions, follower growth, engagement rate (likes, comments, shares as a percentage of reach) and, occasionally, referral traffic if the content links out. These are visibility metrics. They tell you the content is being seen and resonating. They rarely connect cleanly to revenue without additional tracking.
Paid social shows up in cost-per-click (CPC), cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS) and conversion data. These connect more directly to commercial outcomes but are subject to attribution gaps, especially post-iOS14 on Meta.
Community health and brand sentiment show up in qualitative signals: the nature of comments, share of voice against competitors, tone in mentions. These are harder to quantify but often the earliest signal that a brand is resonating or losing ground.
The Australian context
Australian social media usage skews heavily toward a small number of platforms. Facebook retains strong reach across older demographics and regional markets. Instagram dominates for lifestyle and retail categories. LinkedIn is the default for B2B. TikTok has grown fast in under-35 demographics but advertiser adoption in Australia lags the US by roughly two years.
Australian Consumer Law and the Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) code of ethics apply to paid social and influencer content. Undisclosed paid partnerships are a compliance risk. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has taken action on misleading influencer posts, and the disclosure requirements are clearer now than they were even three years ago.
Australian audiences are also smaller than US audiences on every platform. This pushes cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) up and makes it harder to find large lookalike audiences for paid campaigns. The audience math is different and should be.
Where people get this wrong
Related terms
Common questions
How do I know which social platform to focus on?
Start with where your audience actually spends time, not where your competitors post. Check your existing referral traffic in Analytics, look at where branded mentions come from, and talk to recent customers. Picking a platform because it feels modern is rarely a good enough reason.
Is organic social still worth it with declining reach?
Yes, but the goal shifts. Organic social is no longer a reliable distribution channel for most businesses. Its value is brand credibility, audience warmth for paid retargeting, and search-adjacent visibility. Set expectations accordingly and stop measuring it like a paid channel.
How much should an Australian business spend on paid social?
Enough to test properly and not so much that a failed test hurts the business. Testing requires volume. Underspending on paid social produces inconclusive results. The minimum viable test budget depends on your CPA target and conversion rate, not on a percentage of revenue.
Do I need a social media manager or a paid media specialist?
Organic and paid social are different enough that the same person rarely does both well. An organic specialist thinks like a publisher. A paid specialist thinks like a media buyer. If budget forces a choice, align it to the goal: brand building points to organic, direct acquisition points to paid.
Keep exploring
About New Rebellion
New Rebellion is a marketing intelligence consultancy. We build tools, score Australian businesses on how their marketing actually performs, and publish Debrief every day. This dictionary is part of how we work in the open.
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