SMM (SMM) Social media marketing. SMM promotion on social networks - what it is and how it works

Hello! In this article we will talk about such a promotion tool as promotion in social networks or SMM promotion.

Today you will learn:

What is SMM;
What tools exist;
How to implement SMM marketing.

What is SMM promotion

Many entrepreneurs skeptically wave their hands when they hear the phrase “promotion using social networks” or SMM. Each of them is sure that social networks are not capable of bringing customers, since they are aimed not at sales, but at entertainment. They are right, but only half. Social networks can attract customers and increase sales.

Sell;
Inform;
Teach;
Entertain.

Selecting tools for promoting a page on a social network

White promotion tools on social networks - all officially approved tools for promoting groups and pages on social networks. Each social network is represented by its own promotion tools.

But the most common ones include the following:

Targeted advertising– small advertisements in various areas of the resource page, as a rule, they consist of an image and a caption to it. Such advertising is displayed only to a specific target audience, the parameters of which can be selected in the settings of this type advertising on a social network. Almost all social networks offer targeted advertising. The average cost for a month of placing such advertising is 5-10 thousand rubles, payment is made both for impressions and for clicks (your choice).

Advertising in other communities and social network pages. Almost every social network has a community platform where an advertiser can place advertisements for their group. Each community sets its own price for advertising, but on average, a one-time placement will cost you from 100 to 500 rubles.
Competitions– an excellent tool for promoting your company’s group. Organize a contest in which a lucky random person who reposts the post will receive free gift from you, and users themselves will spread information about your company on the social network.
SEO—group optimization. Yes, yes, pages on social networks also need to be optimized for results both in search engines and in the results of the social network itself. But in the case of a group, we need to optimize the following elements: the name of the group - affects the results on the social network and in the search engine; group description – affects the search engine placement; URL – affects the location in the search engine.
Communication with users. The most labor-intensive and useful way. It allows you to better understand the consumer and gain his trust.

Gray tools – tools for promoting groups and pages, the use of which is prohibited by the rules of social networks.

These include:

Cheat subscribers. Not endorsed by any social network. It allows you to rise in search results on a social network, but there is a high probability that the social network will “see through” you and block your page. The average cost for 1000 bots ranges from 100 to 1000 rubles.
Spam is also prohibited by the rules of social networks. However, it can bring positive results. To do this, you just need to send advertising messages only to those who may be interested in your offer.
Massfollowing – following someone on a social network in the hope that they will follow you back.

Black tools – those promotion tools that are prohibited not only by the social network, but also Russian legislation. This is hacking pages and then sending spam.

Content Creation

The main thing here is not to forget who your consumer is and that your ultimate goal is to sell the product.

This means that you must adhere to the following rules:

Create content that the user would want to post on their page. Your content should revolve around the product, brand or company and at the same time interest the target consumer. Everyone knows that a person “reposts” a post when it reminds him of some situation from his life or himself, take advantage of this fact. This is what the Coffee House cafe chain did, which posted pictures with a funny owl and the captions “Bright morning”, “Sometimes coffee is the only reason why I still have friends and a job.”
Brand graphic content and videos. Apply trademark on your images and videos, otherwise you will not be recognized.
Teach. Show users how else they can use your product; don’t be afraid to come up with something unusual.
Open the comments and let users discuss you.
Create a plan for posting new posts. You need to consider when during the day your target consumers typically visit social media. But in any case, the publication of new entries must be done at least twice a day.

To evaluate whether the results that advertising on social networks provide are worth the time, effort and investment, you need to analyze its effectiveness. Russian social networks have more than several hundred million active users, foreign ones – even more. But even a high concentration of the target audience on one site does not guarantee success advertising campaign on social networks.

What is SMM?

In internet marketing, promotion on social networks is called SMM promotion. SMM (Social Media Marketing) is a process of attracting customers, implemented using social media channels. SMM is part of internet marketing. But due to the fact that promotion in social networks is very different from website promotion in search engines, marketers have separated it into a separate direction - SMM marketing.

Most often, social networks are used for informal communication with clients, attracting traffic to the company’s main website, and promoting the brand of b2c and b2b companies. If SMM is used as one of the main tools for doing business, then a separate vacancy opens in the marketing department - SMM manager.

His responsibilities include:

Development of an SMM promotion strategy.
Determining the target audience and its needs.
Targeted advertising management.
Increasing user activity in the community.
Group design development.
Filling the community with quality content.
Statistics analysis and more.

In addition, the SMM manager must work with other social media channels, for example, forums or blogs. Instead of employing such a specialist on staff, you can also use the services of specialized agencies or freelancers.

Pros and cons of advertising on social networks

Before including the cost of advertising on social networks in a company's marketing expenses, you need to evaluate how feasible it is. When a businessman encounters SMM for the first time, he is attracted large number social media audiences. And therefore they seem to be an ideal platform for business development. However, the situation is not so one-sided.

Risk of account blocking, hacking or deletion. Social network is good platform for promotion, but all rights to regulate activities within its framework belong to the administration. You can invest a lot of time, money and effort into promoting a community, but end up with nothing. In addition, social media accounts are the most likely to be hacked.
Limited functionality. Social media channels have a limited set of features. In particular, this concerns the branding of official communities. For some types of businesses, this prevents subscribers from fully engaging in the life of the brand.
High level of competition. Both large companies and private entrepreneurs are engaged in business promotion on social networks. It is affordable and does not require major investments. Therefore, there is a very tough fight for clients on social networks.
Lack of complete confidentiality. It is believed that some government organizations have access to commercial information, personal correspondence and company activity as a whole. There is no direct evidence of this, but if a businessman values this kind of data, then you should not put it on social networks.

It is best to use SMM promotion as an addition to an online advertising campaign. It’s not worthwhile to completely transfer brand promotion activities to social networks, but it’s also not advisable to give up a bonus source of traffic.

Social media promotion tools

Before engaging in SMM promotion, you need to figure out what you can do and what you can’t do. Promotion tools are qualified according to legality of use:

Completely legal methods (white) - officially approved for use.
Partially legal (gray) - allowed by Russian legislation, but prohibited by the rules of social networks.
Prohibited (black) - prohibited by rules and legislation.

It is strongly recommended to promote a company on social networks using only white hat methods. Otherwise, you can not only waste a lot of time and effort in exchange for a ban from the administration, but also “tarnish” the company’s reputation.

White methods of promotion:

Targeted advertising. Targeted advertising is a kind of contextual advertising only within the social network. In its settings, you can also specify the parameters of the target audience, select a payment method, determine the time of displays, etc. To effectively place an advertisement, you first need to create a profile of your potential client.
Advertising in communities. You can advertise a group in another community either for a fee or for free. For paid advertising, you need to contact the administrator and discuss the conditions. For free – find an interested partner. For example, a wedding planner and photographer can collaborate pro bono, mutually benefiting from the partnership.
Competitions. It is appropriate to use competitions when the community has already gained a starting number of “live” subscribers. The essence of this promotion tool is that users must independently spread information about the community in exchange for a valuable prize. Therefore, most often the main conditions of the competition are subscription and repost.
SEO optimization. The internal search of a social network uses ranking algorithms similar to search engines. Therefore, to get to the TOP search query, you need to optimize the title and description of the group.

Another important factor influencing the effectiveness of advertising on social networks is content. By setting up targeted advertising, you can regularly pay for clicks and receive nothing in return. The quality and quantity of posts influences the attraction of new subscribers and the retention of old ones. To save time on systematically filling the group, you can use auto-posting.

Gray methods of promotion:

Increase subscribers, views, likes, reposts. The use of bots to promote the community is prohibited. Therefore, if the administration of a social network suspects that a group is rising in search results, thanks to the artificially created activity, it will immediately block it.
Purchasing offers. Buying offers is a less risky way to get a starting number of subscribers. But it should be remembered that the offer only creates visible demand for the community and is not included in the target audience. In addition, services for selling offers are not honest. Therefore, instead of “live” users, you can get a stream of fake subscribers.
Massfollowing. Mass following is a subscription to users in the hope of mutual subscription. This is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process, so special automated applications are used to carry it out.

Gray promotion methods are only applicable to initial stage community promotion. When there are only 100–200 “live” users in your subscribers, it’s not as scary to lose them as it is to lose several thousand.

Black methods include hacking pages and sending spam. Sending spam is prohibited not only in the Russian Federation, but throughout the world. And the effectiveness of its use is not commensurate with the possible risks.

Social Media Promotion Strategies

Developing an SMM promotion strategy begins with setting a goal. To set a goal, it is enough to know why social networks are usually used by businesses. The goals of SMM marketing are:

Promoting the company on social networks.
Brand promotion.
Website promotion through social networks.
Promoting a personal brand.

If the goals seem the same at first glance, they are not. For example, to promote a brand, informal communication with clients and building trust relationships, and to promote the site - the uniqueness and exclusivity of the content with a link to the main source.

To make a competent SMM strategy, you need to work through each stage. Strategy stages:

Setting a goal.
Defining and segmenting the target audience.
Selecting social media channels for promotion.
Creating a company image on social networks, creating content.
Development of a communications plan for each segment of the target audience.
Selecting indicators for analyzing advertising campaign costs.
Preliminary budget calculation.

After drawing up a strategy, you can begin to implement it. But if you plan to work on several media channels at once, then you cannot do without a specialist in the field of SMM. The fact is that each social network has its own specifics and features, so you need to create content separately for each social network.

Contract for promotion on social networks

Freelancers and SMM agencies have standard contracts for the provision of services. But certain nuances for each project are prescribed individually. To get the desired result from SMM promotion, you need to pay attention to the following clauses of the contract:

Subject of the agreement. The subject of the agreement is the provision of promotion services on social networks. Object – group, page, community on a social network. The contract must clearly state the characteristics of the object at the time of its signing (number of subscribers, data on activity and traffic, targeted advertising).
List of works on promotion in social networks. The list of services can be specified in separate application or directly in the contract itself. This may include SEO optimization, design, content filling, etc.
Required volume of subscriptions, subscriber criteria. The contract will be considered fulfilled when the contractor reaches the number of subscribers specified in it. Therefore, the document indicates the exact figure. You can also specify subscriber criteria to protect the group from banal cheating by bots.
Obligations, rights and responsibilities of the parties. The main obligations of the performer that you should pay attention to are the coordination of all promotional activities, for example, the provision of a group design layout and a refund if the account is blocked. In addition, the contract may provide for a penalty charged to the contractor for failure to comply with the deadlines for completing the order.
Validity of the contract. The term of the contract specifies the maximum allowable time for fulfilling obligations. If the performer was unable to achieve by the specified deadline necessary indicators, he must bear the punishment for this specified in the “Responsibility” section.
Estimate. The estimate is the approximate cost for the entire range of services provided by the contractor. Each item in the estimate must be studied very carefully. Many performers include services there that are of little value to the customer.

In addition to the contract, professional SMM managers offer customers to fill out terms of reference. It gives a detailed idea of the task at hand and allows you to indicate all the nuances that the performer must pay attention to.

Viral advertising on social networks

is media content distributed by social network users through reposts. She is one of the most effective ways promoting a company or brand on social networks. Since the initiator of the spread of viral advertising is “live” users.

It is almost impossible to develop viral advertising on your own. Entire teams of marketers work on creating video stories (the most common viral ad format). The project is developed according to 4 principles:

Creativity.
Brevity.
Target audience response
Quality.

A viral video should contain a minimum of advertising (a few frames with the brand logo at the end of the video) and a maximum of exciting, interesting, and sometimes indecent and flashy plot. In any case, one video is not enough. Viral advertising unpredictable, so it is impossible to determine in advance what exactly will hook users.

How to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising on social networks?

When promoting a brand, assessing the effectiveness of advertising on social networks is complicated by the fact that it cannot be measured in terms of sales. The goal of companies that promote their brand is to increase customer loyalty, create an image and increase awareness. But these parameters cannot be represented in numbers. In this case, the effectiveness of advertising is assessed based on the following criteria:

Audience growth.
Increased user activity.
Increasing the number of transitions to the company’s official website.
Involvement of subscribers in the life of the group.

When a company has a completely different goal - sales, then the effectiveness of promotion on social networks is measured by classic indicators:

Conversion rate (CTB) – the ratio of the number of real buyers to group (site) visitors.
Click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of the number of clicks to the number of impressions of an advertisement.
View Rate (VTR) – the ratio of the number of views to the number of impressions of an advertisement.

An advertising campaign is considered successful when its costs are recouped through sales. But due to the specifics of some companies, payback may not occur immediately. For example, a company selling cheap jewelry will be able to assess the effectiveness of promotion much earlier than a company resale of used cars.

TOP 10 books on promotion on social networks

SMM has become a serious trend in internet marketing. Industry conferences, seminars, and thematic courses dedicated to this area are held annually in Russia. But social media promotion trends are changing so quickly that techniques that were effective yesterday are becoming hopelessly outdated today. Therefore, books on SMM will only give a hint to beginners; only constant practice will bring professional experience.

Books are not the only source of information for training a novice SMM manager. Today, many successful specialists lead personal blogs and make video lessons in which they share their observations and life experiences. But the main task remains with the student - to apply the theory in practice.

Today we will answer the question of what SMM is and how it works. The abbreviation SMM stands for Social Media Marketing, which in turn translates as Social Media Marketing.

In essence, SMM is everything that is in one way or another connected with promotion and promotion on social networks. The main platforms for promotion are usually Instagram, VKontakte, Facebook and Odnoklassniki.

Why is this relevant? There are more than 65 million users of various social networks in Russia. According to surveys conducted by Statista, Russians use YouTube most actively, VKontakte comes second, and Odnoklassniki comes third. Facebook and Instagram are slightly behind.

How does SMM work?

Social media marketing includes many methods of operation. The most popular of them are the creation of groups and accounts on behalf of companies and brands, targeted advertising, working with opinion leaders (bloggers) and content creation.

The main emphasis is on creating useful content that will be shared by subscribers. It is believed that publications on social networks inspire more trust among potential clients.

When SMM appeared in Russia

Many agree that the concept appeared in the early 2000s, when the Internet became widespread. In Russia, this area of marketing began to develop in 2008. First of all, this is due to the rapid growth of VKontakte and the absence of any restrictions, for example, you could invite all your friends to the group at one time.

But as a separate direction, which began to receive attention, SMM began to appear in the early 10s, and somewhere starting from 2012-13 it acquired cutting and certain canons.

Business promotion using SMM

To understand whether you need SMM, answer the question Why do you need promotion on social networks? If you don’t have a clear understanding of what tasks you can solve and what goals you can achieve, then with a high degree of probability you will not achieve desired result. There is no point in starting social networks just for the sake of it.

Typically SMM is used to solve the following problems:

talk about your products and services;
collection feedback, working with negativity;
organizing traffic flow to the site;
increasing brand awareness;
and much more.

Make your list of tasks, and then decide whether you need SMM.

Agencies and SMM specialists

With the advent new sphere in marketing, people have appeared who are specialists in it. They help businesses manage social networks and attract new customers.

Also, entire agencies have appeared that specialize in social media marketing.

Pros and cons of SMM

Pros:

Ability to communicate directly with the client. If the client has objections, you can close them in private messages or in comments.
Huge audience - by going to social networks you get access to an audience of millions.
Minimal start-up costs - registration and creation of a group on any social network is free.
Targeting - using targeting or special programs for parsing, you can easily find your target audience by parameters: age, gender, interests.
Development of functionality - many updates appear every year: payment systems within the network, the ability to place goods, publish articles, etc.

Cons:

The result requires permanent job: daily posting, content creation and so on.
There is no 100% guarantee of results - no serious specialist will guarantee you will achieve a certain result.
High competition - standing out from competitors is becoming more difficult as more and more companies create accounts and launch advertising.
Increase in cost - as a consequence of the previous point, the cost increases. The more players there are on the site, the more you have to spend fighting for the client.

Social Media Marketing, or marketing on social networks, or in short, simply SMM. So, what is SMM? This is a unique process of attracting attention through the use of social platforms. Social media is used as promotion channels. Simply put, if you want to promote a store, you need to write about it “In Contact”. But seriously speaking, SMM is a more complex and multifunctional process, which is what we will talk about.

SMM

Today, a third of Internet users know what SMM is. Although most of them don’t even realize that they use SMM almost every day. SMM refers to the promotion of a specific product or service using social media. SMM specialists place the main emphasis on creating content that social network users could distribute without the direct participation of the organizer.

Social media marketers believe that the messages that users post on social media pages create trust among potential consumers. This type of promotion makes it possible to specifically influence the target audience. Using SMM, you can select sites and resources where the target audience mainly gathers, so that advertising affects only interested people. Not only goods or services are promoted on social networks, but even the media create accounts with their content and thus expand their audience, or companies simply create a favorable image for themselves. That's what SMM is.

Benefits of SMM

Compared to other means, SMM has a number of undeniable advantages:

Reaches a large audience.
Each social network has its own unique audience, which is united by socio-demographic characteristics and interests.
You can define your target audience as accurately as possible. Most social networks have mechanisms that allow you to identify representatives of the target audience among all users and show advertising only to them.
SMM promotion is easy to manage. In addition, most social networks have advertising exchanges where you can create advertising posts.
There are analytical systems that allow you to track traffic data.
Social networks can be used for search engine optimization, this will speed up the process of adding the site to the search engine database.
If something relevant and interesting to a specific target audience is advertised, the subject of the advertisement immediately becomes a topic of discussion. Naturally, this contributes to increased sales.
You can conduct a dialogue with potential consumers.
Promotion on social networks is an excellent word of mouth.

Flaws

Although even here there are some disadvantages. For example, it is impossible to achieve instant results. Before an SMM campaign starts working, it needs to be promoted for several months. Also, conducting dialogues can play an extremely negative role, for example, if negative reviews remain without comments or other advertising messages appear on the page. Moreover, no one guarantees ultimate success. In SMM marketing there are no clear rules that must be followed in order to attract an audience and achieve success. It is difficult to calculate the budget because it is not known how long the advertising campaign will last. In addition, social networks are not suitable for every product; if a user is looking for something specific, then he will probably turn to a search engine.

Tasks

SMM marketing was created in order to perform a number of specific tasks:

Attract additional traffic to the site and look for new consumers of goods or services.
Make the brand recognizable to the audience.
Win the loyal attitude of consumers.
Improve the company's image. On social networks, a company can provide support to its customers, answer questions or provide advice.
If you apply SMM correctly, you can organize a constant flow of sales.

Features of implementation

Before starting to promote a product or service on social networks, an SMM manager must do several preparatory steps. First, the company must decide target audience and highlight the right users from the bulk of social network users. If you don’t focus your advertising campaign on the right people, then there will be practically no conversion. Secondly, you need to optimize the company’s website, but here we are not talking about SEO optimization, but about information promotion, that is, you need to fill the site with useful and interesting articles. Only after this can you begin full-scale SMM promotion.

Social Media and Goals

The overwhelming majority of users using SMM marketing are sure that its main goal is to obtain a certain number of subscribers. However, the task of any advertising campaign is to sell a product or service, but not to entertain the audience. And all this must be presented in numbers. Goals can be communicative and economic. The economic goals of SMM are to increase sales by a certain percentage, reduce promotion costs, or the company may want to occupy a certain market share.

Communication goals are to inform the target audience and provide feedback that will form a loyal attitude. And these goals should be expressed as a percentage.

Promotion methods

Just as in the case of website promotion, there are three types of social network promotion. In accordance with the legality of promotion methods, white, gray and black optimization are divided.

White hat optimization includes promotion methods that are officially permitted. The most common promotion methods are:

Targeted advertising. These are small advertisements that can be placed anywhere on the social network. For example, in the news feed or under the menu block. Such advertising must have a memorable image and signature, and most importantly, it is shown only to users with relevant interests.
Competitions. To promote a group, they often use competitions of the type: share the post and on such and such a date a random user will receive a gift. Thus, users independently disseminate information about the company.
Advertising in other communities. An advertiser can place advertisements for their product in other communities with similar topics.
Group optimization. Even pages on social networks should be optimized for search results on social networks. That is, for the community you need to come up with an appropriate name, make a description of the group and optimize the address.
Communication. Thanks to the ability to write comments, a company representative can establish contacts with consumers, which will play an important role in promotion.

Gray and black optimization methods

Using gray optimization methods on social networks is prohibited. These methods include processes such as getting subscribers. Of course, this will raise the group’s position in the search, but if the system detects “foul play”, the group will be blocked. You should also not send spam, although this method has positive results. But mass following is not prohibited by the administration of social networks, and it is also difficult to track. This process consists of a group subscribing to a consumer, who can subscribe in return.

As for black hat optimization methods, this includes methods that are prohibited even by law. For example, page hacking.

Content

SMM training should not only be about understanding technical points, but also in the ability to create interesting content. Of course, when creating your next publication, it is important to remember that the ultimate goal is to sell a product or service. But with all this, the user needs to be intrigued, interested and create a favorable impression of the product. Therefore, several requirements are put forward for the content:

It is better to post new publications when there are the most users on the network, and in order not to lose positions, it is necessary to publish two informational and advertising posts every day.

Search for employees

Maybe that’s why today you can find many advertisements for SMM marketer vacancies. It is worth noting that this trend in advertising has existed in Russia for about five years. There is quite a bit of specialized literature in Russian. Basically, specialists learn from foreign, usually American, books, and from their own mistakes. The fact is that different audiences perceive advertising messages differently. And what may be a successful marketing ploy in the USA will be perceived by Russian consumers as some kind of absurdity.

Additional tools

But despite such a young industry, programmers have already managed to create several auxiliary tools. One of them is SMM-planner, a deferred posting tool. Thanks to this resource, users have the opportunity to schedule posts for posting on eight major social platforms.

This program has a simple and intuitive interface. To get started, you just need to register in the system and connect the necessary platforms. For each network you can select different times publications. In addition to the function automatic posting, the service has several more indispensable SMM tools. User reviews show that using the “glider” gives a lot additional features. There is a weekly display of content here. Can be downloaded new post and see how he will look on the court. And there is also the possibility automatic deletion post after some time.

Of course, such a pleasure is not free, but the cost is purely symbolic - for 50 posts you need to pay 49 rubles. It is possible to publish advertising posts for free, and you can also pay extra for additional features, such as statistics, traffic, forecast, etc.

Conclusion

So, what is SMM? This is a young industry of online advertising that uses social media for publication. SMM marketing is highly effective and over time can become the main source of advertising.

We released new book“Content Marketing on Social Media: How to Get into Your Followers’ Heads and Make Them Fall in Love with Your Brand.”

is a marketing tool for developing and increasing awareness and loyalty, as well as increasing audience involvement in discussions related to the company’s activities on social networks, forums and blogs.

Cover everything more users. These platforms open unlimited possibilities communication with potential clients. Therefore, enterprises, ranging from small businesses represented by one person to large corporations, open representative offices and set up SMM marketing on social networks.

Social marketing SMM is based on communication with the audience and allows you to more accurately analyze the mood of customers in the market, your competitors and quickly respond to existing situations.

We have prepared another interesting article -. Do you want lead the community and receive maximum return? Read!

SMM methods

Creating a profile. Social media marketing begins with creating a page dedicated to and representing the company. You should remember that you must communicate with users and respond to their comments. Moreover, negative comments should not be deleted, but completely dealt with. To delve into the problem that the user is facing, to offer solutions that will suit him. And thus turn a negative into a positive review.

One successful example is the official GoPro Instagram account. The total number of his subscribers exceeds 13.5 million. And each publication receives at least 100,000 views.

The company page is so popular due to the content it publishes. It's so immersive that you don't notice how time flies as you scroll through videos and photos taken by GoPro. Moreover, most of the material was provided by camera users. And this is a great advertising move that allows the product to speak for itself.

Another interesting example is the collaboration between the Taco Bell and Snapchat brands, which resulted in the creation of an application.

It processes a user's photo in such a way that their head turns into a giant taco. In one day, the number of views was more than 224 million.

When starting SMM, it is important to understand that it does not give a quick effect. However, with his correct use you will get long lasting results.