Case Study: In May 2013, the Castrol Motorcycle Castrol Mota launched its Facebook page with the goal of creating an online community centered around a shared interest: motorcycles. The organization believed that Facebook would be the ideal social media platform to tell the brand’s story and showcase its products to consumers. Castrol Mota decided to compare its organic content with its paid content, using social media campaigns to engage the public with its brand on Facebook. In the first two quarters, it recorded 26,000 interactions with the audience and 5,000 likes—an impressive result for organic content.
However, given that Facebook is a global network and organic reach is not controlled by region, only 20% of the new likes recorded came from followers located in the United States; in other words, the results of this social media strategy did not meet expectations.
After a year, Castrol Moto decided to focus on sponsored social media campaigns on Facebook based on followers’ region, age, and interests, while simultaneously publishing organic content. The performance of both campaigns was analyzed to optimize results, and it was concluded that paid content led to an exponential increase in results. In addition to this significant improvement, the quality of the content was also refined based on feedback and engagement from the audience.
By adopting paid content, the brand was able to achieve results 11 times higher than expected, which allowed it to identify the right audience for its ads and determine how to target them.