SMM promotion - get followers, likes, views in social media

SMM (Social Media Marketing) is a tool for customers and sales from social networks.

Today, SMM is not just about kitties and likes, but real sales. Of course, you can just create a community, publish 5 posts a week there and wait for crowds of new customers to come. It doesn't work that way. Without a systematic approach, there will be no result.

If you want to get likes, views, followers on social media, https://lowcostsmm.com/ has a large number of useful services, both paid and free.

With independent SMM promotion strictly follow the order is not necessary, but it is convenient!

SMM-strategy social media

Where to start? With the development of SMM-strategy - a plan to achieve the company's business goals with the help of social networks. The strategy will help to define the goals of presence in public media, ways to achieve them, prioritize, and most importantly - to predict the potential effect and not to stray from the planned route.

To write an effective strategy, you need to:

• assess the current position of the brand in social networks: the number and activity of subscribers, relevance and quality of issues, find all mentions - what and how they talk about you;
• conduct a competitive analysis;
• compile a consumer portrait;

formulate a unique selling proposition - something that differentiates the firm and its product/service from competitors. It helps to brainstorm with colleagues, survey clients - why they chose you; It is not only low price that helps to build a competitive edge;

Determine the format of your presence on platforms.

Formats of presence on social media:

• commercial format: you do not hide your commercial interest and openly offer to buy your product or service. Typically, such groups contain a product catalog, discussions with questions and feedback from customers, and the content is commercial in nature. The goal of the commercial format is sales;
• Interest-based format. Such communities build a sales funnel. The goal is to gather as many potential customers as possible from the target audience, and then little by little publish advertising. As a rule, at first subscribers do not even guess that the resource belongs to the enterprise. Users are involved inpabliky through interests, publishing useful and relevant information and research: about music, business, fashion, cooking, etc.;
• mixed format. The company acts as an expert - publishes useful thematic materials, periodically diluting it with commercial. If the information is useful, unique and relevant, your reputation as an expert will grow, and thus the loyalty of traffic. Your opinion will be trusted, your advice will be listened to and, most importantly, it will correlate with the promoted brand. The level of professional competence is one of the key factors that influence the decision to buy. For example, Alfa-Bank develops its pages for b2b clients according to this principle. Community administrators realize that only commercial banners will cause boredom and negativity, so they give useful information for the business, mentioning the brand.

Graphic design of groups

You meet people by their clothes. A corporate account is the face of your business. It should look professional: develop branded avatars and covers, create a post design template that will make your posts stand out in subscribers' newsfeeds.

A checklist for creating a community

• Title. Formulate a community name based on your brand + your primary keyword query. Think about how potential customers can search for you and check the data in Yandex.Wordstat.
• URL address. Should match the brand name and be the same in all social networks. Sometimes the address you want is already taken. It is worth finding a short memorable name that can be written on a business card, packaging, signage.
• Company Description. Try to fit all the information briefly and immediately state your advantages. These points affect the position of your groups in the search engine Yandex and Google:
• Discussions. Create the main topics and keep the information in them up to date: reviews, the opportunity to ask a question with your problem, discounts and promotions. Instagram does not have such an opportunity, so you can periodically ask for feedback in posts. In facebook there are reviews, and with the tricks of ranking: those reviews that caused the most lively discussion are raised up. So don't forget to respond to positive reviews as actively as to negative ones.
• Privacy settings. Always be open so that anyone can join you. Do not disable comments. Allow only administrators to upload photos and videos to albums. VKontakte has a great option to add words to a spam filter, which helps block foul language. Monitor comments on all your activity on a daily basis.
• Alerts. To respond promptly to messages in groups, set up alerts and check the email to which notifications are sent. For our clients we use special services that instantly notify about new comments in all resources.
• Showcase. There are in Vkontakte and Facebook: you can add goods and services as cards with prices. There are services that allow you to automatically upload goods from the catalog on the site to the storefronts of accounts. We recommend using them if you have a large catalog of products and prices change frequently.
• Identification marks. Geo-tags and branded hashtags should be created and used in the official community, this will help users find your content and share it on social media. Simply adding a hashtag to a post is not enough. You need to follow certain rules. We create a guide for our clients on how to use hashtags.

Creating a content strategy

What is content marketing? It is the creation and distribution of useful information that meets the interests of your audience and helps solve their problems.

What is content marketing for? To demonstrate your expertise, gain the trust of your audience, increase their loyalty and ultimately exchange that loyalty for money. Investments in a media product are strategic: brand loyalty is not formed overnight, so expect to see a commercial effect in 3-6 months. Content is the foundation of effective business promotion in social networks.

Content strategy should answer the following questions:

• What do we want to say to our audience?
• How often will we say it?
• What format and style of content will we use?

Content categories

• Entertaining - this is what users come to you for. This type of content gets good viral reach, meaning everyone actively shares it with their friends. Examples are well represented in our case study of an online garden goods store;
• Educational - helps the user to solve their problems, educates, broadens their horizons. This is a great way to demonstrate the competence of the company as an expert in its field. With the help of expertise and not only we managed to get 881 leads for 363 rubles in SMM of cosmetology clinic;
• Commercial - actually an offer of your products or services. Motivate everyone to click on the link, call or take another targeted action. Do not abuse such content, on endless advertising publications you will only get unsubscribes. This content is great for promotion, here is a great example of how Facebook and Instagram posts can sell designer furniture;
• User-generated - anything your customers post. Testimonials about your services, product reviews, restaurant photos, and anything else that mentions your brand or unique products/services. It helps well in getting user feedback to run a contest, here are contest tips from our experts;
• Newsworthy - subscribers are interested in what you create yourself. No beautiful picture from a photobank will not tell about your business better than a photo made by you. Don't be afraid to talk about the inner kitchen, introduce your employees, share successes and failures. Your sincerity builds trust with subscribers. We very often give customers' products and services to small but active bloggers to try out.

What else is important to consider when creating content:

• speak to your subscriber in their language;
• break up large text into blocks - it will be easier for the reader to comprehend;
• Observe the frequency of publications - issues should come out regularly.

What to do if there is not enough material and ideas?

Information hunger often occurs in b2b segments. If you make 50 posts in the first month, and on the second month you find that there is nothing to write about - this is a bad scenario. Evaluate your strengths wisely, define the headings and sources of information.

An example of rubrics and content sources for one of our b2b clients:

• introduction to the company's employees - a few photos in the working environment, a short story about the inner kitchen of the business and its members;
• photos and videos of the production process - immerse the reader in the atmosphere of the company;
• photos of products in the interior: visualize the possibilities of using the product;
• repost of user publications with branded goods;
• chronicles of events - professional development courses, exhibitions, seminars in which you participate;
• graphics from the designer - branded holiday greetings, presentation of a new product, etc.
• If the article is helpful to you, we also have detailed instructions for SEO promotion.

Social media promotion

It's not enough to publish content, you need to promote it. In order for your publication to be seen by your target audience, you need reach, i.e. as many views as possible. It's good when you have a large and loyal audience of your own who actively share your content. What to do if your own reach is not enough?

Targeted advertising

Targeted advertising in social networks are text and graphic ads that are seen only by those who meet certain criteria: gender, age, geography, etc.

Payment models for social media ads:

• CPC - pay per click;
• CPM - payment per 1000 impressions;

payment for interaction (comment, like, repost, photo or video view) - available in facebook and instagram.

Launching targeting take into account that the price per click, display or interaction is influenced by:

• the relevance of the content to the selected audience - the more relevant and useful it is, the lower the price per click;
• the amount of text in the image - the more text, the higher the price per click;
• the level of competition - the more advertisers show ads to the same audience, the higher the price per click.

What kind of publications should be promoted? First of all, commercial ones. You can combine an informative post with a link to the product. In the links of ads do not forget to put UTM-tags to track the effectiveness in analytics systems - Yandex.Direct or Google Analytics. Along with commercial posts, promote entertaining, unique, interesting material. This will allow you to get a large and cheap coverage, interested audience and media effect.

What are the targeting options?

Basic:

• Gender;
• age;
• geography.

In social networks, users are united according to various criteria. For example, in VKontakte, interest targeting is based on the behavior of a particular account: who it is subscribed to, what activity feeds it reads, comments and likes. In myTarget (sites belonging to the Mail.ru Group network), interests are formed based on the history of visited sites, search queries, information from the account in Odnoklassniki, etc. It is also possible to upload your own client bases. For example, you can upload client databases of e-mail addresses and phone numbers to the advertising offices of all media networks. The system searches for the accounts of the owners of these contact data in the network and shows them your ads. If your own customer base is not enough for you, you can find audiences that are similar to your customers on social networks. This technology is called look-alike.

Recently, Vkontakte has introduced the ability to save the audience that has seen your commercial ads. For example, you can create a list of those who hid your ads and no longer show them banners.

New formats and targeting appear or are updated on average once a week. Therefore, it is better to contact professionals to run social media targeting.

Advertising in popular groups

Advertising in communities is a tool that will help you tell about your product to the audience on popular thematic platforms of Internet networks. Algorithm of placement in popular groups:

Make a list of groups that are suitable for placement. When choosing a community, pay attention to the activity of its users (how many comments and likes people leave under posts). We have repeatedly come across the fact that subscribers in a group are 50 000, and the average number of likes and comments is 5-7 pcs. Subscribers of such pages are bots;

send a request to the administrator to place an ad. Request the cost and conditions: specify the time during which your publication will be on the first place and after how long the administrator will delete it. Request access to the community statistics, this will allow you to better assess people's engagement;

After payment and release, track the effectiveness. How many clicks there were on the link to the site, whether the number of subscribers has increased.

Advantages of buying advertising through an online agency:

• in the process of selecting sites for our clients, we have collected a large base with direct contacts of group administrators;
• we know which sites work, and which will not bring results;
• and we also get good discounts.

Working with opinion leaders

Opinion leaders are those people whose opinion has an impact on the audience. Why? The answer in one word is trust. You can use this to your advantage:

• increase brand awareness;
• attract new subscribers;
• increase sales.

Who can an opinion leader be? It is not necessarily a famous actor, athlete or politician. Today, the opinion of hundreds of thousands of people can be influenced by a mom with many children, a fitness trainer, a food blogger, a car or video game reviewer.

Read more about how to work with bloggers and how much it costs in our article.

Social media reputation management

Online reviews have an impact on purchasing decisions. People share not so much technical information about products or services, but about the feelings they evoked in them.

• Reputation management is a tool tasked with bridging the gap between how a company or brand positions itself and how it is seen by the CA.
• Be open to feedback and criticism;
• Respond to all messages about your brand, respond to both positive and negative feedback;
• Work on mistakes.

Don't delete negative reviews or leave them unattended. An angry user who has been ignored, misunderstood or banned will not stop until they complain about you everywhere they can. Act like a lightning rod: direct the user's energy to the place where you feel more comfortable responding, in other places - also leave a comment that the dialog is already in progress and leave a link to the source. Evaluate the possible damage and the expected compensation. If you can give a discount, free shipping or a small gift - do, but don't let yourself be blackmailed in public.

Negativity can benefit your business if handled properly.

Social media contests

Contests can be categorized into 3 types:

• repost contests: a prize is awarded to a random user who reposts a particular publication;
• creative contests: they require a creative approach. For example, compose a story, draw a picture, etc. These events have a smaller reach than reposts, as they require a lot of effort to participate;
• photo contest: this format helps to get user-generated content. Standard conditions - the participant must publish a photo with a branded hashtag.

If you have a product or service with a low cost of production, or which you can offer for free - this is the best option for a prize. But remember that the prize determines the activity of the participants, so you should not skimp.

How to choose a good prize for a social media contest:

• Seasonal relevance. For example, a kebab grill in the summer is good, an artificial Christmas tree is bad;
• the value of the contest. Users won't be lazy to price it before participating. Focus on the equivalence of people's efforts and the status of the company, on average the budget is ~ 5000 rubles for small companies, ~50 000 rubles for federal large organizations, ~500 000 rubles for global brands;
• Usefulness of the prize. Will show true care and knowledge of your users, it is like a birthday gift that hit the "spot".

The prize should match the theme of your business. You shouldn't raffle off movie tickets if your online store sells sofas. Exceptions can be in joint contests, when you are not direct competitors, but your audience is the same. For example, when we held a joint raffle between a catering company and a company that makes serving boards, the prize was kitchen boards and a box of chocolates.

Once the prize is chosen, the big and important work begins:

• Writing the text and creating a banner layout that will want to be shared;
• searching for communities to post in;
• communicating with administrators. We recommend personal communication rather than using exchanges - you can negotiate a discount;
• purchasing and monitoring placement;
• summarizing.

With a competent description and an interesting prize, the cost of attracting one participant can be less than 1 ruble.

This is the result we got when we held a repost contest for the online store Empire Gardening.

• Prize: a thermal bag;
• Total value: 1615 rubles;
• Number of participants: 1792;
• Cost per participant: 0.90 rubles.
• Payback of advertising in social networks
• What indicators to track in groups:
• Growth of subscribers;
• number of unsubscribes;
• audience coverage - users who viewed community posts on the wall or in the newsfeed;
• post engagement ratio: average number of likes + comments + reposts divided by the number of followers and multiplied by 100;
• engagement rate to reach: average number of likes + comments + reposts divided by reach and multiplied by 100;
• comments of commercial nature: asked the price, where to buy, the address of the store, etc.

What indicators to measure on the site:

• number of organic and commercial transitions from social networks;
• quality of traffic from social networks: bounce rate, time on site, number of pages viewed;
• conversions on the site by traffic from virtual networks: adding to cart, sales, filling out forms;
• associated conversions: a Google Analytics report that shows how many conversions social networks have participated in;
• calls: in order to track which calls were from visitors from social networks you need to connect call tracking.

All these indicators should be analyzed only in relation to costs. Based on this, you can calculate and optimize the following KPIs:

• Subscriber price = social media budget / subscriber growth for the selected period
• Conversion price from social networks = budget spent on social networks / number of conversions on the site from organic (non-advertising traffic) from social networks
• Conversion price from targeted advertising = budget spent on targeting / number of conversions from commercial transitions from social networks.

For the purity of the calculation can include the cost of the work of a specialist who leads you social networks.

Track the effectiveness of transitions from social networks is quite simple with the help of UTM-tags. Also with high accuracy you can analyze the dynamics of transitions and sales from social networks in general.

But there are not many tools for analyzing the effectiveness of blog posts. Usually bloggers are given a special promo code. And Instagram recently released an update that allows you to connect a blogger as an external contractor of your page and see more detailed stats from their promo post. We also recommend allocating multiple call tracking numbers for different social media channels.

If you have the ability to read data from CRM, it's not a problem to estimate the ROI of social media advertising. Look at the examples of calculations in a cosmetology clinic.

What does a novice SMM-manager need to know about promotion

There are no subjects for which you should not use SMM. There are companies for which you can make direct sales through social networks, and there are businesses for which you can create an image and communicate with customers.

Social networks are not only about creating a group, filling it with pictures and inviting your colleagues there, they are your face, just like a website. It's an additional sales channel.

There is no universal recipe for "when-where-how-many-what", it all depends on the business sphere and target audience.

There are ways to get users almost for free, but it is really free if you act yourself and you are very lucky, otherwise - you have to pay for the services of a specialist.

SMM is better to outsource. The manager most often does not have time to deal with virtual accounts networks. Of course, you can entrust to lead social networks sysadmin, sales manager or even an accountant. But since SMM is not part of their main duties, the quality will be low and the result will be appropriate.

You can't create a group without thinking about strategies and without having plans for the future.

1 post a week, a day or an hour - it doesn't matter, the main thing is regularity.

Make the content interesting and you won't have to pay for reposts.

Make contests and do not be afraid that the costs will not pay off.

Creating a community, remember - you need to respond, answer questions, comment on reviews.

With a small budget, choose only one social network: do not duplicate in all popular social networks, but invest your budget and develop each one in turn.

Creating a product, including video, without which no group should not do without - the event is costly and requires a huge amount of internal work. Don't assume that a specialist for a modest fee will travel to the production site and take non-stop photos of employees.

Social media, like any internet marketing will pay off when the business is established in all processes. If the manager is rude to customers, couriers deliver broken goods, competitors have the same product twice cheaper - groups in social networks will not help, and will be an accumulation of negative feedback.

Social networks multiply touch points with brands, give cheap and high-quality coverage, participate in sales funnels, you should not measure the effect only by direct sales.

CRM-systems and digital tools - when SMM becomes a powerful channel, you need additional helpers to capture leads and more. Implement domestic software and do not create problems for the future with import substitution and emergency migrations.