Organic vs paid mention
An organic mention is a post about a brand that the brand did not pay to produce; a paid mention is one the brand sponsored, boosted, or ran as an ad. The split matters because the two surfaces obey different physics: organic mentions move comments, paid mentions move likes. Sentia separates organic from paid at ingest in 2026 by cross-referencing post IDs against the Meta Ad Library, the TikTok Commercial Content Research API, and creator partnership disclosures.
What it is
Organic mentions are unpaid: customer reviews, journalist write-ups, creator posts without a sponsorship deal, and casual social-media chatter. Paid mentions are sponsored posts, boosted organic, paid creator partnerships, display ads, and any other placement the brand bought.
The distinction is technical, not philosophical. A paid post on Instagram includes a paid-partnership tag in the API payload. A boosted organic post returns ad-library metadata. A pure organic post returns neither.
Why it matters
Mixing organic and paid into one bucket destroys the most useful signal in the dataset. Paid reach is a function of budget; organic reach is a function of brand affinity. Comments are an organic-only signal because boost spend moves likes far more than it moves comments. If a metric goes up after a paid push and the comment rate is flat, the lift is bought, not earned.
How Sentia uses it
Sentia separates organic from paid at ingest. The Meta Ad Library and the TikTok Commercial Content Research API mark sponsored posts. Creator partnership disclosures, paid-partnership tags, and ad-library matches are joined back to each ingested post. The product surface keeps three numbers visible: brand-paid spend, creator-partnership spend, and EMV from organic.
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