# What is Paid Social?
Canonical URL: https://www.velocity.li/glossary/paid-social
Description: Social media advertising where you pay to display content to targeted audiences. Paid social includes sponsored posts, display ads, and promoted content.
## Main content
# What is Paid Social?

Paid social refers to any form of social media advertising where a brand pays the platform to display content to specific, targeted audiences. This includes sponsored posts, carousel ads, video ads, story ads, and promoted content. Paid social allows precise audience targeting based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and custom audiences. It complements organic social strategy by enabling you to reach beyond your existing followers and target specific business objectives like website traffic, lead generation, or sales.

## Examples

- IRunning an Instagram Reels ad targeting women aged 25-34 interested in skincare, with a link to shop.
- IICreating a LinkedIn Sponsored Content campaign to promote a whitepaper to marketing professionals.
- IIIUsing Facebook's Custom Audiences to retarget website visitors with product ads on their feed.

## Why it matters for social media

As organic reach continues to decline on most platforms, paid social has become an essential component of a comprehensive social media strategy. It allows you to reach exactly the audience you want with precise targeting options.

Paid social also provides robust measurement and attribution capabilities. Unlike organic posting where attribution is often fuzzy, paid campaigns offer clear data on impressions, clicks, conversions, and return on ad spend.

## How Velocity helps with Paid Social

Velocity agents help you apply paid social across real social workflows: research, platform-ready content, scheduling, publishing, analytics, and recommendations. The full workspace helps you optimize, track, and improve performance without splitting the work across separate tools.

Learn about Analytics

## Related terms

### Organic Reach

The number of unique people who see your content without paid promotion. Organic reach depends on your content quality and algorithm performance.

### Impressions

The total number of times your content is displayed on screen, regardless of whether it was clicked. Impressions measure visibility, not engagement.

### CTR (Click-Through Rate)

The percentage of people who click a link after seeing your content. CTR measures how effectively your posts drive traffic to external destinations.

### Reach

The total number of unique users who see your content. Unlike impressions, reach counts each person only once regardless of how many times they saw the post.

### KPI

Key Performance Indicator: a measurable value that shows how effectively you're achieving your social media objectives. KPIs keep your strategy data-driven.