The rise of Organic Earned on social

A new generation of fast growing brands has emerged post-lockdowns. Not surprisingly, they tend to be TikTok champions, but more unexpected is the unprecedented share of organic Earned in their activity mix. (up to 75% of the total footprint for top brands)

This share rarely exceeded 10% back in the golden age of Instagram (2014-2020), and goes to show how fast and how much the “winning playbook” has evolved.

This note explains why organic earned is on the rise, and what brands can do to land more of it while lowering their reliance on paid Earned.

There are several factors driving the rise of organic Earned:

1. Suffering from influencer fatigue, Gen Z now craves independent information about brands:

   • All branded activity that’s viewed as unbiased, unfiltered enjoys higher odds of success (UGC, viewer comments etc)

2. TikTok’s meritocratic algorithm allows anyone to go viral: 

   • This motivates smaller accounts to try their luck: even a fraction of posts from that long-tail of small accounts can mean a huge amount of engagement

   • While Instagram remains primarily “oligarchic’, it is gradually becoming more meritocratic 👏🏻

     

     IG Engagement rate for influencers: smaller accounts are getting more reach at the expense of larger accounts

3. Search plays a key role on social (esp. on TikTok): as a result, savvy creators feature popular brands for free (i.e. organically), knowing it helps them land more views and new followers

The above highlights dynamics behind the rise in organic Earned content, but it doesn’t really explain the orders of magnitudes we see for winning brands, e.g., we estimate that well over 90% of Sol de Janeiro and Drunk Elephant earned activity is in fact organic. Why?

Brands with positive momentum enjoy self-reinforcing loops of organic activity - made up of the following stages:

1. 💬 Viewers are more likely to comment on posts that feature popular brands: this richer comment activity makes posts “stickier”

2. Algorithms (esp. TikTok’s) reward sticky posts with more views, leading the top 20% of posts to land 93% (!) of engagement

3. These viral posts fuel trial, UGC (#haul, #review etc.), and even organic posts from opportunistic creators keen to surf the wave of popular brands 🏄🏼‍♂️

4. All this organic activity grows brand trust and tolerance for its (inorganic) content: “if so many people post about that brand without getting rewarded, it must be a great brand!” 🧐