It’s time to face the harsh truth: organic social media reach is getting harder and harder to achieve for businesses. If you’re not convinced, consider these alarming stats: 70 percent of Instagram posts aren’t even seen and organic reach has notoriously declined on Facebook for years.

That’s why millions of businesses have turned to social media advertising.

In fact, many businesses focus a majority of their efforts on paid media because their belief is that organic social media is dead.

Is it? Not exactly. Has it declined over the years? Of course. Does organic social media still have value? Absolutely.

Focusing on only a paid media strategy or simply funneling all of your efforts into organic social media won’t cut it. Businesses that tie their organic and paid media strategies together see the most return on their investment.

Here are three reasons why you need to be actively pairing your organic and paid social media strategies.

Get a better understanding of your audience

When you combine organic and paid social media strategies, you get a better picture of your following.

You can analyze the demographics that engage most with your organic posts, and target these individuals with your ads, knowing well that these people are likely to respond positively to your promoted content.

On a similar note, organic posts give you insight into how well people receive your content. For example, let’s say one of your Facebook posts sees a lot of engagement. You get a lot of impressions, clicks and even the engagement metrics are through the roof.

To maximize the success of that post, it’s worth promoting it further as an ad. The chances are, you’ll see high engagement and a high click-through rate.

Grow your online presence

When you sync your paid social media and organic social media strategies, you maximize your overall presence. While paid media is designed to bring awareness to your brand, organic social media does a great job of boosting loyalty. The two ultimately go hand-in-hand.

Let’s say someone discovers your brand through a Facebook ad, then that user proceeds on to your other social media profiles to browse. Put simply, the ad has brought awareness to your brand and having a solid organic presence shows a strong connection to your customers.

Organic supports paid and paid supports organic

Organic and paid social media are two sides of the same coin. One simply does not work without the other.

Your organic content is all of your tweets on Twitter, posts on Facebook or pins on Pinterest. It’s the foundation of your social media efforts. It’s the driver behind community engagement. When you take that strategy away, you eliminate a large piece of your social media activity. And when you do that, your ads suffer.

You’re probably wondering how that might be, especially if you’re implementing audience targeting and bidding for ad placement. Aren’t people supposed to see my ad, click and keep coming back? Sure, people may see your ad and click, but if they discover that you have a minimal organic social presence, they won’t stick around.

Paid social media is how you can take your content a step further.

Brands get it right by integrating their organic and paid media strategies seamlessly into an overall social media plan.

When you sync your strategies so that they work together, you maximize the success of your overall social media marketing. If there is one thing to take away, it’s to note that organic and paid social media work better together.