A lot of businesses today believe that without an ad budget, they can’t grow their brands on social media.
This is a myth that has discouraged beginner brands with limited budgets from leveraging organic social media, which has always been a solid foundation for building brands on social media.
As a digital marketer, I have grown my brand on LinkedIn, which is a professional social media platform, without spending money on ads. I have also seen brands that generate lots of high-quality leads and sales from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X without spending money on ads.
So if you’re a brand that doesn’t have money for ads and are ready to play the hard game of growing on social media organically, this guide is for you.
I shared with you all the practical steps you need to take to grow your brand on social media, generate leads and sales, and even compete with your competitors that spend heavily on ads.
1. Define Your Brand and Audience
Before you begin to think of how to grow your brand on social media organically, first define it, so your target audience will know what you stand for and your mission.
Ask yourself these questions: What does your brand offer that your competitors don’t? How will your products and services improve the lives and well-being of your customers? What is that thing you want people to think of whenever your brand is mentioned?
These are key questions that will help you clearly define your brand and lay a solid foundation for your growth on social media.
Coming to your audience, keep in mind you aren’t leveraging an existing audience, which is the case when you run paid ads.
It’s a different game where you must define your audience, build it from scratch, identify their pain points, and understand the type of content that resonates with them—just like how understanding call center features is crucial when setting up a customer support strategy.
Let’s assume you’re a fitness coach for women on Instagram. Your audience is women who want to look fit and have an attractive physique. They will be interested in home workouts, meal prep and recipes, body confidence, and home workout equipment.
Some of their pain points could be struggling with being consistent with their workout, not having a healthy meal plan, and not identifying affordable home workout equipment that will help them in their fitness journey.
I know you will be asking the best way to identify your ideal audience. The following tips will help:
- Analyze your existing followers. Monitor who comments on your posts, likes, or shares them.
- Check your competitor’s content with massive engagement. Scroll through comments, tagged content, and shares.
- Use social media user engagement tools like polls and stories to get the opinion of your audience.
- Pay attention to content that performed well. It could tell you what your audience cares about.
2. Choose A Suitable Platform
Being everywhere isn’t an ideal strategy when it comes to growing your brand organically on social media. Not all social media platforms are suitable for the product and service you sell.
Let’s assume you’re a perfume brand in the United States. LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter) won’t be suitable platforms. This is because users there are after intellectual discussions that often lead to jobs, selling digital products, and offering services.
An ideal platform will be Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, which are visual platforms with lots of young people who want to smell good.
Also, every social media platform has its own engagement habits and content style that moves the needle.
For a brand that sells perfume on Instagram and TikTok, short videos will drive more engagement than images. Users on these platforms are entertained by videos. They comment, like, and share them with friends and even go ahead to take a desired action.
3. Optimize Your Social Media Profile
This is an important step to growing your presence on social media organically.
Social media algorithms won’t keep track of your account and content if your profile isn’t optimized. For any social media platform you find suitable, create a username, and write a bio/description using keywords relevant to your brand, product, and services you sell.
Choose the appropriate category, add address, business email, phone, and other details that make you a brand.
The aim is to boost your visibility and get the algorithm to understand your account, your audience, and the problem you solve.
Profile picture and branding are also part of the puzzle. If you have a brand logo, add it as your profile picture.
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For your background image, use your logo and colors associated with your brand to design it. This builds trust with the audience that checks out your profile after consuming your content. It also makes it easier to recognize your brand online and offline.
Add links to your landing page, websites, downloadable freebies, online store, and newsletter to direct your audience to take action.
Nowadays, with tools like Linktree, you have your links under one platform and add them to your social media profile. Any user who clicks the Linktree will see every link you have there.
Tal Holtzer, CEO of VPSServer, says, “Technology should take care of the busywork, so people can focus on building real relationships.” Optimizing your social media profile isn’t just about visibility. It’s about removing friction so your audience connects with you faster and more meaningfully.
4. Create Content That Resonates and Converts
This is where the work starts. Keep in mind that organic reach is the fuel that powers your brand on social media. You need to put in effort in creating helpful content that positions you as a go-to brand for solutions to problems in your niche.
That is the type of content that resonates with your target audience and gets them converted to sales.
For example, Justin Welsh is a popular creator on X who has built a personal brand that is worth $5M via his newsletter of 170k+ subscribers. He leverages his huge audience on X to drive organic traffic to the newsletter to get more sign-ups.
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In his newsletter, which I’m part of, he makes money through ad placements, sales of digital products, and consultation.
He’s a typical example of how one can leverage organic social media to grow a brand by just creating valuable content consistently.
From my experience, below are the types of content that move the needle on social media platforms:
- User-generated content, especially from your loyal customers that serves as testimonials or reviews.
- Relatable storytelling that can inspire your audience to take a desired action.
- Infographics and carousels that are educational. This type of content captures and retains the attention of users while scrolling. It works well on LinkedIn, especially for B2B marketers.
- Entertaining short videos like reels and stories. This type of content works best on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
5. Be Consistent
Consistency is key if you want to get results fast with growing your brand with organic social media. Remember, you aren’t running ads, so you have to post high-quality content many times a day.
Being consistent is simple. One of the tips that has helped me is creating a simple content calendar. You can have a plan for the content you want to post in a month. Additionally you can repurpose content with AI for various platforms to maintain consistency in brand voice.
Thankfully, social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and Facebook now have inbuilt scheduling tools.
Use them to plan and schedule your content ahead so you can post consistently.
If you want more advanced features, opt for third-party scheduling tools like Bulk.ly that have more sophisticated features that make planning, creating, and scheduling content easier.
6. Take Engagement Seriously
Having a loyal community is a powerful way of growing your brand on social media without an ad budget. Thousands of fans who are loyal to your brand on social media is an asset.
They help spread the good news about your products and services to their families and friends within and outside the platform. That’s free PR, but it doesn’t just happen.
You have to build this community of loyal fans by taking social media engagement seriously.
Don’t post content and disappear.
Stick around to respond to the comments of your audience.
Reply to DMs, create polls and surveys frequently to keep the conversation going even when you are asleep. Host AMA (Ask Me Anything), Live Q&As to deepen connection and build more trust with your audience.
Connor Gillivian is an SEO expert on LinkedIn who is building a loyal SEO fan base by engaging frequently with his audience.
For every post he makes on LinkedIn, he likes and responds to comments.
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He currently has over 100k followers on LinkedIn, some of whom are his SEO clients, who will one way or the other get him more clients through referral.
7. Cross-mode and Collaborate
Collaborating with other brands in your niche and industry is a strategic way to grow your brand with organic social media.
Identity and connect with other growing brands in the industry. Share each other’s content, do joint giveaways, shout-outs, and go live on IG, TikTok, and podcasts to boost the visibility of your brand.
“Partnerships are a smart way to grow your brand organically,” says Alex Vasylenko, Founder of Digital Business Card. “They allow both sides to reach new people, build credibility, and boost engagement through authentic content.”
8. Leverage Trends and Hashtags
Trends and hashtags are social media tools you can use to boost your reach on social media platforms, especially on Instagram and TikTok. Keep an eye for trends in your niche, and jump on them to create relevant posts to boost your reach.
Challenges often happen on TikTok.
Identify any that suit your niche and join in creating content to give your brand more exposure.
Add popular hashtags to your content before posting.
Many audiences use them to search for relevant content to consume, especially when a topic is trending.
For example, sometime in 2025, Fitness Fusion was a challenge on TikTok under #FitnessFusionChallenge.
It was all about blending different workout styles like Yoga + HIIT or dance + strength.
As a gym instructor, fitness creator, or brand that sells gym equipment on TikTok, it was a perfect challenge to join. The idea is to create content around this challenge to boost your reach and get more exposure.
9. Analyze, Learn, and Improve
While you are working to grow your brand using organic social media, it’s also important that you analyze performance, learn from what is working and what isn’t, and then improve to boost performance.
Social media platforms now have advanced analytics tools. You can effectively track reach, saves, engagement, shares, mentions, and follower growth.
Pay attention to content that has performed well in the last 30 days. Analyze and create more of those content frequently, then tweak them to get your audience to take a desired action like signing up for your newsletter, trying a product for free, placing an order, booking a consultation, etc.
“You can’t improve what you don’t track,” says Lucas Riphagen, the President and CEO of TriActive USA. “Analytics help us figure out where to double down and where to pivot. Without it, you’re just guessing.”
What Happens When Your Brand Begins To Grow Organically On Social Media?
After implementing all the tips I suggested above, you begin to see serious growth with your brand on social media – your impression and reach are growing fast, engagement is becoming massive, the leads and sales are coming in, just know it’s time to invest in paid ads.
Yes, you have laid a solid foundation with organic social media and have made sales. It’s time to have a small ad budget.
You’re now at the stage where you need to scale your brand, and paid ads will help you a lot.
From my experience, paid ads make the algorithm know more about your brand. You also reach more audiences than you can’t reach with organic content.
A $5 daily ad budget on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, X, or LinkedIn isn’t much, but it’s a good place to start.
Be it for impressions, clicks, leads, or sales, it’s worth putting a budget aside for ads.
Also, consider paid collaboration with top-rated influencers in your industry, especially if you want to boost your reach and get more target audience.
Influencers shape the opinion users have about brands. They influence their decision when choosing a product to buy on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
Contact them, pay their fees, and have them promote your brand to their loyal fans.
Final thoughts on Organic Social Media Growth
Building a brand on social media without an ad budget is possible. I have shown you some individuals doing it on platforms like X and LinkedIn.
You’ve also learnt strategies that work, starting from defining your brand and audience to analyzing performance.
As a beginner, nothing stops you from building that brand using organic social media.
When you begin to make sales, you can invest in paid ads to scale your growth and generate more leads and sales.
