Promotion through social networks: strategy development and main mistakes. SMM promotion on social networks - what it is and how it works

It took radio 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million, television 13. Facebook gained 200 million users in less than a year.

More than 82% of Internet users have accounts in social networks and sit in them (at least) two hours a day. Russia ranks first in Europe in terms of popularity of social networks.

There is a growing number of users who come to social networks not for communication, but for information, as well as businessmen who understand that social media is an effective marketing channel. If you want to promote a project through social networks, then get acquainted with four effective ways of promotion.

Content is the main factor of promotion

Any SMM specialist will confirm: without quality content, promotion tools are useless. If your brand’s page is boring, you shouldn’t count on audience growth and loyalty.

Three components of good content:

Uniqueness. The information you post should be relevant and engaging. Do not copy materials from other resources. The exception is cross-posting between a company’s blog and its page on a social network.
Regularity. Articles should be published systematically. Two, three, four or seven times a week - depends on the specifics of the business and its target audience. So, for people from the business environment, two or three updates will be enough, but for the beauty community this is clearly not enough. It is necessary to adhere to the chosen content strategy regardless of the number of subscribers.
Virality. Publications should be lively, evoking an emotional response in the form of a burning desire to tell friends about them. Avoid overtly promotional posts.

Facebook in Russia- “social services are not for everyone.” It is used by marketers, programmers and other IT-savvy people. They are not afraid of a “complex interface”, and their areas of interest include gadgets, the Internet, travel, education, books and business in all its forms. They willingly like and share materials on these topics, as well as motivating articles that set the mood for positivity. Most of Facebook's active audience uses mobile application- It is recommended to illustrate posts with pictures measuring 800 × 600.

"VKontakte"- the largest social network on the Runet (more than 230 million registered users). Her audience is younger; Users' interests are mainly focused on entertainment (communication, games, music, movies, etc.). VK users do not like text content (it is advisable that the length of the post does not exceed 500 characters), but they love photos and videos.

The most popular among photo hosting sites in Russia is Instagram. At the same time, when maintaining a brand page on Instagram, it is recommended to adhere to a single design style (use not only standard filters, but also third-party photo editors), and also place objects in the photo on 2/3 of the screen (this makes the picture more visually attractive).

Targeting

The ability to place targeted advertising is available on almost all social networks: VKontakte, Facebook, Odnoklassniki and others. At the same time, it is believed that targeted advertising on social networks is more suitable for the B2C sector. However, there are also companies in B2B that effectively solve business problems through targeted advertising.

Some types of targeting:

Geographic (geotargeting) - displaying advertising to residents of a certain region / city / district, etc. For example, you want to promote a beauty salon located in Khimki near Moscow. Your targeted ad will be shown to residents of this city.
Socio-demographic - displaying advertising depending on gender, age, marital status and other social criteria. Thus, it is recommended to place advertisements for children's products and household goods on the pages of married women over 25, and advertisements for an art store - on the pages of designers, architects, and decorators.
Contextual - displaying advertising in accordance with the user's interests. Membership in groups such as “Fashion”, Fashion, “Shopping”, etc. clearly demonstrates the user’s interests. He will be interested in relevant advertising.
Behavioral - displaying advertising depending on specific user actions (travel routes, favorite places, frequent search queries, etc.). Let's say a person is interested in Latin American dancing, goes to a salsa club, and looks for relevant videos - there is a high probability that he will be attracted by an advertisement for a last-minute tour to Cuba.

Despite its apparent simplicity, targeting is a tool that requires serious preparatory work. First, you need to analyze the brand's target audience. Secondly, make an ad.

Advertising in communities

Advertising in communities (in the professional language of SMM specialists - sowing) is the purchase of posting posts or reposts in popular communities. In the first case (purchase of a post), the advertiser’s goal is to increase traffic on the company’s website; in the second (buying a repost) - attracting users to the company’s group on a social network. Moreover, the more subscribers the community in which you buy a post has, the more expensive the advertising campaign will cost.

You can negotiate with community owners directly or use the services of a special exchange. In 2013, it was opened by the social network VKontakte (an account for advertisers). Advertising is placed by the community administration in its feed and, according to the conditions, must remain there for 24 hours.

Professional promotion in social media

This refers to services that provide paid promotion services on social networks. As a rule, they independently create high-quality content, launch a targeting mechanism and negotiate advertising in communities. These include Plibber. Why conditional? Because the capabilities of this service are much wider.

register;
decide on the format of work on the site (you can advertise your brand yourself or contact the Plibber team to organize a shocking advertising campaign);
prepare an advertising post;
select the most suitable sites from the target audience and begin sowing.

After preliminary moderation, your task will be available and you can start attracting fans of your brand.

How to get organic loyal traffic? We addressed this question, which is of interest to all advertisers, to the founder of the Plibber project, Oleg Ratunin.

Oleg Ratunin

CEO and ideological inspirer of Plibber.ru. Knows everything and more about social media.

To attract potential fans to your brand, you should:

use quizzes, infographics, illustrations, viral videos, advertising games, etc.;
place a link within the visible area of the post announcement (first and second lines);
introduce a call to action into the content;
add a provocative survey;
work with associative content format and its adaptation to the brand;
launch creative, vibrant and unique competitions.

If you manage to find the content that your audience craves, you can count on over 600 clicks per post.

Also, do not forget to analyze the communication of large brands with their subscribers; now good results are being detected in the community

Since one of the effective ways to make money on VKontakte is to create a thematic community (and use it as an advertising platform), in this article we will look at the most popular ways to effectively promote it.

What is group promotion?

Note the fact that popularity for the community on the social network plays a very important role important role, since the presence of a large and high-quality audience is the main requirement of advertisers.

Let's take a closer look at VKontakte.We enter the search query “sports” into the search bar and get an impressive result - 123,023 (!!!) different thematic communities.Of course, those that are higher in the list than others have advantages, that is, they are in the TOP of the search.

Communities in the TOP have the best search traffic (that is, the number of real visitors clicking on search results), which allows them to be replenished with new members/subscribers without much effort.

Considering high level competition in social networks, another question arises: “How to bring your group to the TOP of the search?”, that is, make it recognizable and successful.

The solution to these issues determines the essence of “promotion”, which involves carrying out certain actions necessary to promote and popularize the group on social networks.

Promoting a group on VKontakte so that it ranks high in search results is a difficult but achievable task, which is achieved mainly by recruiting/subscribing active participants. The first stage of this process is to carry out internal optimization, namely:

A person who creates a group on a social network needs to make every effort to make it interesting and comfortable. The main goal is to create a community unlike others, which the user, having visited once, would want to return there more than once, and, of course, would share information with his friends.

Now that the group has already been created, we have to figure out what methods can be used to “promote” it. There are quite a lot of them, but we will conditionally divide them into two main groups - paid and free. Let's look at the most effective ones.

Free methods of group promotion

A fairly simple and affordable way to promote a group on social media. networks in the initial stages, which does not require much effort. The mechanism is simple: you compose an interesting invitation text and send it to your friends using messages within the social network. The more friends you have, the more potential members for your group/public. But you should remember that you can send no more than 40 invitations per day.

The method is similar to the previous one, only the invitation text is sent out already strangers. It is necessary, using the provided search filters (by region, age, gender, profession, interests) of the social network, to select a possible target audience according to the criteria we need, and start writing a personal message with an invitation to each person found in this way.

You cannot send the same message over and over again, as this may be considered spam, and this will result in a ban on social networks! In addition, remember that there is also a daily limit on the number of such messages.

If the rules of thematic communities allow you to post various messages (including advertising) on your open “wall”, use this opportunity for self-PR and attracting new members to your group. Some communities even create special advertising sections for such invitations.

Longreads

Another popular way to promote VKontakte groups is the so-called longreads - voluminous articles that are highly adaptable and fast loading from any devices.

Such articles are very successful on social networks, occupy high positions in search engines, and have a number of advantages compared to regular posts.

Create attractive content in the form of presentable longreads (with a clearly defined purpose), and combine them with regular posts and other activities. By the way, you can now maintain a full-fledged blog through the VKontakte group)

Promotion using PR groups

This method is ineffective and labor-intensive, but it still has the right to life. On social media networks exist large number special groups that are used to promote others. This happens according to the following scenario: you look for PR for a group (just use a search on a social network), join them, and leave an invitation to join your group in each of them.

This method seems to look good, but given the huge number of people who, like you, will ask to join their groups in the same way, your post with an offer in the placement list will most likely move very far down, in a short period of time (where it probably no one will see it anymore). And it’s difficult to name the target audience of the participants who joined in this way.

Automatic invitation

Currently there are many various programs to automatically send invitations to join your group to users of a certain social network, which naturally looks attractive. But there is one “but” - most of these programs are ineffective and harmful.

For the security of your PC and social network account, it is not recommended to use this method due to its unreliability. If you find a correctly working program in which you are absolutely confident, this can give a certain positive result.

Promotion via Youtube

Having a channel on the most popular video hosting site, you can also actively promote your group or public (of course, provided that this channel has good traffic and the video has good views). The essence of this method is to create videos that talk about the “existence” of your community, information from it, and, of course, its URL link.

If you have a certain audience on Youtube, then with the help of such videos it is quite possible to redirect this traffic to the social network to your public or group.

Paid methods of group promotion

Paid ads

Probably the most popular and frequently used method of promoting groups on social networks is placing paid ads (contextual advertising), which often gives good results.

This method is an excellent opportunity to obtain a target audience, since users interested in your ad click on it on their own, with a high probability of further joining or subscribing to your community if it interests them.

Such advertisements are placed in special advertising blocks (on VKontakte, for example, to the left of the page content), on certain time which you define. The method is quite effective.

Buying subscribers

This method can also be called “promotion using specialized services"There are special sites, the so-called social network exchanges who, for a fee, provide services for promoting communities in social networks. networks, and users can make money on social networks through simple actions: joining groups, likes, reposts, comments, etc.

On these sites, customers can quickly and conveniently select and launch the desired advertising campaign your resource by purchasing custom actions. The disadvantage of this method is that it generates an uninterested audience, that is, it is quite possible that the majority of users joined in this way may simply turn out to be “dead weight” in your group/public, but if quick promotion is required, this is an ideal promotion tool!

Promotion with the help of PR specialists and agencies

This method is very similar to the previous one, the only difference is that the supplier of traffic to your group or public is not specialized sites where “actions are bought” in social media. networks, and freelancers for promotion in social networks. networks (PR specialist) or PR agencies from which you “order” the promotion of your resource. Of course, the price and desired result must be agreed upon in advance.

Unfortunately, the method does not eliminate the risk of getting an “inactive audience”, or getting to a qualified freelancer, but in any case, this method is considered convenient and effective. Often such services are provided at freelance and remote work exchanges .

Some promoted groups and public pages with a lot of traffic offer to buy “advertising space” from them, that is, for a certain fee, they can post a link to the group you are promoting. Naturally, the topics of your community and where the advertising opportunity is provided must match.

Using this method, you get only a high-quality audience, that is, interested in your information, or in the goods or services you offer. You should negotiate the amount of payment and display lines directly with the administrator of such a community.

Promotion using incentives

A very effective way to attract your target audience. Motivation is often what drives interest in your community and sets you apart from your competitors.

Your goal is to interest social media users in your community by various competitions, surveys, games with the opportunity to win prizes, receive bonuses, etc.

As a rule, this gives very good result, and helps to increase the activity of users, and even their recommendations will allow their acquaintances and friends to join your group or public.

Open and hidden SMM are often distinguished. Open marketing on social networks implies promotion on behalf of the brand, the use of corporate identity elements, identification with the promoted company and its commercial offer. Hidden SMM involves promoting a brand, its products and services without identifying with the company. These are numerous reviews, hidden demand stimulation and other techniques.

Opportunities for promotion on social networks

According to Google statistics On average, users study about 10 entries before making a purchase. Moreover, the average user has at least two active accounts on social networks. Accordingly, the probability that a client will look for your company, your product or service on a social network tends to 50%. SMM opens up wide opportunities not only for promoting a brand and increasing loyalty of the target audience, but also for direct and indirect sales. Key opportunities for promotion on social networks are:

Increasing brand awareness, its products and services;
Growing customer loyalty, expanding the audience;
Increasing targeted traffic on the site;
Effective communication through the company-client channel;
Direct sales and driving conversion growth.

Often, high-quality promotion on social networks becomes more important than competent positioning of the company through a website, online store and landing pages. The high activity of the social media audience, the constant increase in demand and the expansion of business opportunities is an area that is important to handle and do it well. A competent SMM strategy will ensure customer loyalty, increase conversion, and increase brand awareness. Social networks are also effective in managing reputation and organizing direct sales - communities can already completely replace the functionality of small online stores.

Popular social networks

Most Russian companies focus their attention on promotion on four social networks - Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, Instagram and Facebook. The reason is the largest active audience, potentially loyal to SMM tools. Let's consider the specifics of promotion in each of these social networks:

Classmates. The social network's traffic exceeds 44 million people per day. Moreover, the age of most of the audience exceeds 25 years. Users are active and potentially loyal to commercial offers;
Instagram. The core of the audience consists of young people aged 18 to 30, with women dominating numerically. 57% of users check their account at least once a day, more than 36% do this regularly. Promotion on Instagram allows you to reach an audience of more than 100 million people. In addition, visual content is traditionally more attractive and is perceived faster by the user;
VKontakte. According to statistics, it is the most popular social network in Russia, which allows you to reach an active audience, the number of which in our country exceeds 110 million people. At the same time, the social network provides ample opportunities for SMM, as well as for direct sales;
Facebook. A social network with a fairly serious contingent. Its number is not so wide - about 30,000 active users in our country, the age core is from 20 to 45 years. At the same time, the Facebook audience is also loyal to commercial offers, and the social network itself provides a lot of opportunities for SMM.

In addition, it is worth paying attention to other social networks - Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn and many other platforms can also be used for promotion. It should be based on an SMM strategy, which will allow you to analyze the degree of effectiveness of promotion in each social network. There is no point in chasing all the rabbits - it is often worth focusing on quality and powerful promotion on 2-3 social networks.

SMM strategy and its components

An SMM strategy should be the basis of any promotion. Only in this case will it be consistent and effective, and the results will be predictable and satisfy the assigned tasks. The strategy must answer the following questions:

What do you want to achieve through social media promotion?
What audience are you addressing, who is your potential client?
What information does the target audience need, what content is it interested in?
Which social networks are most in demand by your audience?
What promotion tools should you focus on?

An SMM strategy should also include content planning, which will allow you to create interesting, in-demand, and possibly viral content that solves your tasks. Particular attention in the strategy should be paid to the conversion of users from social networks, because the task of promotion is to simultaneously increase brand awareness and attract potential clients and buyers to the target site.

It is perhaps impossible to find a person who does not know anything about social networks.

Each of us has at least one account for communicating, listening to music and reading entertainment/educational materials. Social networks have become so tightly integrated into our lives that now almost any field of activity finds its embodiment there. Of course, business is no exception.

Is it really worth promoting your business on popular networks? What should you do for this? Which pitfalls consider? Let's find answers to these questions right now.

Business in social networks: are there any prospects?

Ignoring this possibility is pure stupidity.

Please note that only Germany was able to get ahead of Russia in terms of the number of users:

A businessman who wants to achieve success must take advantage of all the opportunities that open before him.

Why do you need to promote your business on social networks?

Introduce products to new customers.
Use convenient tools for marketing research.
These resources allow you to more accurately describe the image of a potential buyer, explore his habits, tastes, and expectations.
Create a positive image of the company.
Receive feedback from your clients.

Follow reviews about the company's work and products.

It also allows you to work with negativity competently and eliminate problems that you might not even know about (especially important if the company has several branches or a large staff).

And this is not a complete list of advantages.

Are you convinced of the need to present your business on networks? Don't rush into practice.

Before starting, you should also carefully study the mistakes that beginners make over and over again when promoting their business on the Internet.

TOP 7 mistakes for promoting a business on social networks

As you already understand, promoting a business is an activity with great prospects and returns.

But it often happens that the chosen promotion strategy turns out to be initially unsuccessful. Why? Because newcomers to this field, as one, make 7 main mistakes.

Familiarize yourself with them and do not allow the following in your work:

Don't rush.

So don’t rush to give up on your business if you don’t see the effect after 1, 2, 4 weeks.

I'm on my own.

Social networks are a space for communication. Even if you decide to organize a business here, you won’t be able to exist “behind the wall.” Your clients/visitors should receive answers to questions, see impact and interest.

If you want to distance yourself, it is better to conduct business through the website.

Business for business's sake.

The process of promoting a business is fascinating. But if you don't have specific goals, your enthusiasm will gradually subside.

Set specific goals, the direction of the business and, very importantly, how much money you are willing to spend on the business.

Don't be frivolous.

Social media is easy to use. But business promotion will no longer be given with the same ease.

That is why specialists in business promotion on social networks are not “parasites”. Their job is not that easy.

And to master it and do it yourself, you will have to put in a lot of effort.

If it doesn’t work out, I’ll quit!

If you are not creating an independent source of income, but “bringing” an offline business into the social space, every action will be reflected in the reputation of the entire business.

For example, an abandoned VKontakte group filled with spam will signal: “this company is definitely doing poorly if even on VK they can’t keep track of the page.”

Each line of business has its own characteristics. If a company does not have distinctive features, how will it cope with competition?

This is exactly the question you should ask if a crazy thought creeps into your head to simply copy someone else’s promotion strategy.

By the way, stealing pictures is also stupid and undignified.

Lack of analysis.

When testing promotion methods, you need to not only conclude “it worked or didn’t work.” It's important to analyze why some methods work for your audience and others don't.

In this case, you will be able to build an effective promotion campaign.

1) Business on the VKontakte network

There is no need to talk about what kind of social network this is. In fact, every Internet user from Russia has one (and some even have several).

Notice how this resource is ahead of all others in popularity:

Precisely because it is obvious that business promotion on social networks in Russia, first of all, happens here.

Indeed, VKontakte is not only a place of permanent “dwelling” and communication of millions of people. And also a convenient platform for doing business.

Developers also understand this very well, which is why innovations are constantly appearing that make business processes simpler and more accessible.

Also, we must not forget that VKontakte has built-in tools for collecting statistics, which is simply an indispensable assistant for marketing research!

And the main advantage: you can use all built-in services absolutely free.

To promote your business here and earn income, you need to use basic knowledge about trading on the Internet and study the working conditions on this site.

The better you understand, the easier it will be for you to act. And the greater the return on your labor you will receive.

Features of business promotion in VK.

To understand the point, pay attention to the age chart by year of birth:

But we must not forget that any “class” of audience has its own needs. For VKontakte promotion to be successful, you need to adapt to young people, be “in trend,” use short posts and attractive photos.

Another feature of the VKontakte network is the ability to create separate personal pages for business.

As already mentioned, the developers enable entrepreneurs to use numerous functions and built-in services for promotion. Most of them open after creating a “public” ( public page) or groups to conduct business.

For example, you can create an online storefront directly in your group:

5 ways to promote your business on the VKontakte social network.

Now you have created a page or group, set an avatar and filled out the “Description” section with basic information about the business. What to do next?

The article will not separately consider Odnoklassniki.
The audience of these two networks is, of course, different. Therefore, you will have to develop an individual promotion strategy for them.
But otherwise they are very similar to VKontakte (or, in the case of Facebook, vice versa - VKontakte was created in its “image and likeness”). Therefore, having understood the mechanisms of promotion in VK, you can find the further path on your own.

2) How to promote a business on the social network Instagram?

If business promotion on VKontakte is a topic familiar to many, then Instagram still remains “ dark horse", although it appeared on the RuNet quite a long time ago.

The active growth of business pages and the use of this social network occurred in 2014.

Now we can already draw a conclusion: the site is completely suitable for promotion and gives good results. Some entrepreneurs manage to conduct business exclusively in. Just a few years ago this was considered impossible (successful business on the Internet without a website).

The core is boys and girls (the weaker sex is the prevailing majority) 17-32 years old. It is this category of consumers that most often makes purchasing decisions under the influence of emotions.

TOP 5 secrets on how to promote your Instagram account.

An inquisitive reader may note that the article did not cover such resources as Telegram, Pinterest, YouTube and many others.

The fact is that these “fields” for business activities in Russia are not yet particularly developed.

This “base” is more suitable for start-ups, innovative and creative ideas. And if your business falls into this category, do you really need instructions and algorithms for promotion?

Do you want to promote your business on Instagram?

Watch valuable advice from a business coach in this video - and go for it!

And yet you need to understand: when we are talking about a serious brand whose reputation you don’t want to risk, it is better to entrust this work to professionals.

The costs of their services will not particularly hit the entrepreneur’s pocket, but the return will be colossal...