Today SMM is not only memes, kittens and likes, but also a real tool to increase sales, build brand image and attract new clients. About how to make a right SMM-strategy, what content to publish, what tools to use, how to work with comments and feedback, as well as how to increase the audience of communities – tell us in our article.

What is SMM promotion for newcomers?

The acronym SMM itself stands for Social Media Marketing (social media marketing). If we talk about the meaning of the term, SMM is a type of Internet marketing aimed at interacting with potential customers using social networks and messengers.

SMM promotion allows:

• Increase brand awareness;
• Attract new customers;
• Increase sales;
• Increase audience loyalty;
• Build brand image;
• Learn more about your target audience.

Who is suitable for SMM-promotion?

It has become almost a rule of good form for a company to have pages in social networks. Not only commercial companies now have pages in social networks, but also almost all state and municipal organizations. And for B2C businesses, it has become a necessity. Among these B2C segments:

• Medium and small companies selling low-cost products (clothing, accessories, household goods, educational courses);
• Companies providing services to individuals (the beauty industry, repair work, etc.);
• Establishments from the sphere of public catering (coffee houses, restaurants, bars, etc.);
• Stores and companies from the B2C sphere, wishing to cover the Internet audience (stores of large household appliances, furniture, cosmetics, building materials, etc.).

In general, SMM-promotion is a universal tool for companies of any size and any field of activity.

Define and set clear goals

SMM-promotion each company determines independently, depending on the objectives of business. These can be:

• Growth of brand awareness (attention to the number of subscribers and reach);
• Creating a community around the brand and increasing engagement (analysis of audience reaction and interaction with content);
• Collecting leads and increasing sales (website conversions, orders with promo codes are taken into account);
• Analysis of your target audience (surveys, analysis of mentions, reactions to content, etc.).

There may be several tasks. And to solve each of them must carefully consider the tactics of the pages, that is SMM-strategy.

How to develop an SMM strategy

Sophisticated strategy will save from the chaotic conduct of pages in social networks, will help to define the goals of presence in social media, methods and tools to achieve these goals, to set priorities, and most importantly – to predict the potential effect of SMM-promotion.

Before you can begin to develop a strategy, you must:

• Define the business goals that SMM should solve. They must be clear, for example: to increase the number of subscribers on the business page of Facebook in our example by 500 live people with a time limit (2 months). Of course, the goals must be achievable and realistic;
• Evaluate the brand’s current position in social media: the number of followers and their activity, page content, its frequency, types and audience reactions to different post formats;
• Find mentions of the brand in social networks, assess the tone of these mentions;
• Analyze the pages of your competitors;
• Draw up a portrait of your target audience in social networks;
• Formulate a unique selling proposition, identify possible strengths and weaknesses of the product;
• Define the format of the presence in social networks (which social networks will be involved, what formats, frequency of publications and so on);
• Determine the budget for SMM-promotion.

The strategy itself includes the design and concept of the community (whether it’s a blog with useful information, a “selling” page, or, for example, an entertainment site) and a content plan built on that concept. Next, you need to decide how to promote the content and the page itself. To do this, you determine the promotion channels, the necessary tools (retargeting, advertising from bloggers, targeted advertising, contests, etc.) and the budget for the campaigns. An important part is analytics. For this, you need to define the metrics you want to track (reach, engagement, click-throughs, brand mentions, and so on) and select services for analytics.

Social networks often change their algorithms, add new tools, and change the Internet audience itself. So, SMM-strategy should be regularly reviewed, adjusted and improved.

Choosing popular social networks

It is rare to find a user who is registered in only one social network. According to VCIOM, about 7% of Russians surveyed have four or more accounts on social networks, 12% have three accounts, and one in five respondents (22%) have two accounts.

Conventionally, all social networks can be divided into several groups:

• Universal social networks – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter;
• Video hosts – YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo;
• Messengers -Telegram, Viber, WhatsApp;
• Photo social networks – Pinterest;
• Business social networks – LinkedIn;
• Niche social networks – Reddit, Habr.

When choosing social networks for SMM-promotion, it is important to consider several factors:

• Business goals. What you want to achieve with SMM (increase sales, build your image, increase brand awareness).
• The interests and socio-demographics of your target audience.
• The types of content you intend to use most often.

For example, if you’re interested in an audience of young moms, you’re more likely to find it on Instagram*. If you want to attract an audience under 18 with short videos, you can find it on TikTok.

Basic SMM tools

• Content marketing-the main reason users subscribe to a company page is content. This includes not only text, but also video images, stories, podcasts, and other possible forms of presenting information.
• Events can be flash mobs, webinars, live broadcasts, lotteries, promotion codes for subscribers, and special discounts. The main thing is to observe the transparency of conditions, not to break the terms (for example, when announcing the winners of the contest) and be technically prepared (if this is the use of promotional codes on the site or conducting a live broadcast).
• Work with opinion leaders – the publication of guest posts, joint videos, direct advertising, special promo codes with discounts that bloggers provide to their subscribers, the initiation of a controlled “leak” of information about new products in the blogosphere and so on.
• Personal branding-Promotion through the personal brand of the manager (or personal brands of employees), introduction to the team, projects, success stories.
• Communication with customers-This can include prompt answers to users’ questions and comments, surveys, engaging posts that help organize discussion.
• Newslettering-some social networks now have the ability to create newsletters. For example, “VKontakte”, you can invite users to subscribe to news. So you can inform the interested audience about discounts, promotions, range updates. Subscribers to such mailings can be offered special promo codes or other bonuses.
• Advertising in groups / on the pages of thematic communities – Large communities often offer advertising services. For a fee, they repost your post or create a promotional post about your group on their own. This method is more suitable for very “fresh” groups and pages or if you are promoting a Telegram-channel, because there are no alternatives for running ads there yet.
• Targeted advertising-Nowadays, this is one of the most effective options for promotion. Thanks to the settings and the choice of target audience, you can show your ads only to those people who are potentially interested in your products, services or the social network page itself. This way, you can avoid paying for untargeted impressions and more effectively attract customers to you.

Creating targeted content for social pages

There is a “golden formula for content: 40% of materials in the social network should be entertainment and communication, 30% – brand and reputation, 25% – educational and expert, and only 5% – advertising content.

Entertainment content engages and retains an audience. It can bring a community to life and attract new subscribers. In addition, if the community has its own distinctive style of texts and design, it will be easier to “recognize” such posts in the feed. Entertainment and communication content includes memes, games, comics, quotes, short videos, selections (videos, books, services, places, etc.), ratings, news, polls, chats, contests, and giveaways.

Educational content will help build online status as an expert in your field and solve users’ problems or tasks. It can be instructions, research, guides, manuals, tips, reviews, interviews, answers to subscribers’ questions, blog article selections united by any topic.

As a rule, such content is often even more viral than, for example, entertainment content. A selection of useful tips, ideas, recipes, and best practices motivates readers to like and repost them.

Reputational content builds trust in your company, works with subscribers’ doubts (for example, about the quality of products), and increases loyalty. You can publish cases, customer reviews, company news, reports on achievements, photos and news of the “inner kitchen” (for example, to tell about the production itself), news about products and their updates. Content created by employees themselves is also a good fit.

Promotional content is aimed at selling, but it can also be of interest to users. Publish news about upcoming promotions and special offers, posts about product selection, product selections, information about possible payment and delivery options.

Do not forget about the tone of voice (voice of delirium). Communication style brand companies in social networks should not differ much, even if your page at the same time engaged in 20 specialist SMM-department. For example, the tone of voice of “Burger King” can be recognized immediately:

How to organize a discussion

In fact, it’s an art form. Of course, you can ask your subscribers questions at the end of posts, but it’s not certain that they will answer them if the post doesn’t catch their attention.

The solution may be to look for and discuss newsworthy topics (events that interest and engage the public). Among the “regular” infotrends:

• National, world, and professional holidays.
• Major social events (Oscars, Fashion Weeks).
• High-profile news and events of political, social life, science, culture.

Working with comments and feedback

Every day 2.1 million negative mentions of brands appear online. If you add positive and neutral mentions, likes, photo tags, you get a huge number. And the fact that 70% of the people a brand reached out to or responded to their posts are more likely to use a product or service confirms the importance of responding quickly to feedback from users. Of course, within the social networks themselves, there are alerts on new posts, comments and likes in the management sections.

But when a company runs several channels at once, it’s hard to keep track of it all. For example, the average number of social media mentions of one of the bank representatives is more than 100,000 messages. And in this case, you cannot do without special services for tracking mentions, comments, and other audience reactions.

In addition to detailed analytics, such services provide access to various tools. For example, users do not always put a brand mark, geolocation or hashtag. According to the YouScan service, more than 80% of the images and videos online users post without text or even without hashtags. To recognize a brand logo in this case will help artificial intelligence. In addition, the service helps understand the visual environment of the brand, that is, where, how and by whom the products are used.

Also services offer text recognition in storizas, if, for example, the user did not put a hashtag, a mark of the brand page or geolocation. The service Brand Analytics has such a possibility.

SMM-promotion methods to increase the audience of social networks

Unfortunately, no one has come up with universal recipes yet. And without the trial and error method it is often impossible to do without it. There are paid and free ways to motivate users to subscribe to the page.

Among the paid methods are:

• Targeted advertising.
• Advertising with opinion leaders.
• Promotions, contests, games with prizes.

Free ways to promote in social networks:

• Barter with bloggers, when you offer your product in exchange for publication on social networks.
• Mutual PR with other companies on similar topics.
• Using photos of customers with your product. This can motivate other customers to take similar photos, tag and hashtag them, and post them on their pages.
• Viral content (content that users like so much that they share it on their page themselves. This is where useful selections, interesting videos, and instructional cards work well).
• Thematic hashtags (it is important to add only really relevant hashtags. And, of course, do not go overboard with the quantity).
• Geotags (if your business is tied to offline locations, then geotags are a must).
• Commenting on posts with brand tags (this will increase loyalty and trust in the brand).

All of the above methods are “white” promotion methods. In addition to them, there are “gray” methods, such as mass-following, spamming in comments and directing. There are also “black” methods: account cracking, bot scam. For using such methods your account can be permanently blocked. So it’s better not to take the risk.

Explicit and native advertising

Explicit, or direct advertising is specific offers to buy a product or service. In social networks, it is most often presented in the form of targeted advertising. Direct advertising brings sales only as long as you do it. As soon as you stop showing – sales drop. Explicit advertising contains bright and clear calls to action (“buy”, “order”, “go” and so on).

Native advertising is more cautious. This is a full-fledged content that contains useful information on a topic related to the promotional product. In some cases, opinion leaders are involved in brand promotion through native advertising.

What difficulties may arise when choosing a native format:

• First, this is not a new tool. Users are already used to useful content with veiled advertising messages, so many will have no trouble scanning the text and identifying ads.
• Secondly, the creation of the creative itself takes more time, as materials are prepared for each specific site or a specific blogger. For example, one of the most common mistakes brands make is sending the same text to bloggers to advertise on their personal pages. As a result, such messages only cause irritation and negativity among subscribers. Accordingly, advertising can not be considered effective.
• Third, some bloggers put a special tag or hashtag when posting native ads, indicating that they are sponsored content. This can scare off users and end up leaving the material unattended.

However, the native format has more advantages:

• Increase user loyalty. If they find the content really interesting and useful, their interest in your brand will only increase.
• A large number of options for presenting the material. Instructions, games, cards, guides with the possibility of adding photos, videos, links – and this is not the whole list of possible formats.
• High chances of creating viral content. Since native advertising does not directly sell anything and is most often presented in interesting formats, users are more willing to share this information with friends on social networks.

Viral marketing in SMM

Viral marketing involves the target audience itself as distributors of information about the brand. The advertising message in this case hooks the user so much that he wants to share it with his friends on social networks.

Depending on the goals, viral marketing in SMM can be:

• Entertaining;
• Useful and educational;
• Scandalous and provocative.

In what formats it is found in social networks:

1. Images-One of the quickest and easiest ways is to go viral with the latest trending meme. It’s hard to count how many companies have created memes with the Stifler. However, be careful, because the use of the image or the image in the advertising campaign without the permission of the copyright holder can lead to fines, as it happened with a meme about Zhdun. Funny infographics and tables also work well. As an example, the use of tenses in the English language from SkyEng, which clearly showed it with the cat Victor (the cat that Aeroflot did not let into the cabin).
2. Video can be a short video with a popular challenge, a video on social problems, a mini-series, a humorous sketch. There can be many variations, and it all depends on the specific product and target audience. For example, luxury segment products will look strange in short sketches on TikTok.
3. Text-Truly useful text content can go viral. Instructions, guides, and helpful tips are the formats that are most popular.
4. Use of engaging social media formats (quizzes, masks, stickers, and so on).
5. Bonus for review or repost – For example, useful content is often distributed this way (e-books, booklets, and so on). Also, some companies may give a user a discount if he has already used a product or service and wrote a review on his social network page.

The main difficulty with viral advertising is that its effect cannot be predicted. In addition, there is no complete control over the advertising campaign. However, it is often cheaper to create and, if successful, increases user loyalty to the brand better than the usual advertising formats.

Promotion on Instagram

Instagram has long since evolved from a platform for publishing photo content into a full-fledged channel of communication with the user. That is why there is an increasing emphasis on the following things:

• Text quality – Today, it’s not enough just to post a photo. Subscribers are waiting for an interesting and inspiring story.
• Quality, not quantity – Gray methods of recruitment such as mass following, mass liking, and massluking are getting worse and worse. And brands refuse them, because the first priority is not the quantity of subscribers, but coverage, which can be received only at the expense of quality content and well-adjusted advertising.
• Gamification – A huge number of tools in storizas (voting, tests, countdowns and, of course, maxi) allows brands to show their creativity and involve the user in the dialogue.
• Attention to storizas rather than posts – Of course, both formats are important for successful promotion, but trends are such that more and more users are limited to viewing storizas. If in the beginning this tool was perceived as a place to post photos, “unworthy” of the feed, now it is a separate channel of communication with the user, which requires a separate content plan.

Promotion on Facebook

A Facebook chatbot is a masthead for many companies. With a chatbot you can partially automate customer support. Write down frequently asked questions and auto-answers to them, and for complex and individual questions – add to the chatbot communication with the manager.

The video format hasn’t been ignored by Facebook either. For example, you can now invite your followers to watch and discuss your videos together in real time.

Increasingly, you’re noticing in your Facebook feed* that personal page posts are prioritized over company pages. Back in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg wrote that “publicly available content – posts from companies, brands and media – is crowding out the personal moments that make us connect more with each other.” Over time, you could actually notice that there are significantly more personal posts in the feed than branded content. The way out could be to promote employees’ personal brands and, of course, target advertising.

Working on SMO

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the optimization of a website to attract users from social networks, communities, blogs, forums, video hosting sites and so on. Successful work on SMO will help to get direct user traffic bypassing search engines and attract new customers. Such optimization involves changing the site in several directions at once:

1. Well-designed site architecture – Visitors should be able to easily find the information they need, not be annoyed by pop-up windows that encourage them to sign up for email newsletters, and be able to easily transfer selected content to their social networks. Make sure the page isn’t overloaded with too many bright blocks and too many links. Also, find the right combination of page backgrounds and fonts so that the user doesn’t get tired of reading.
2. Engaging content plays an equally important role – In addition to interesting texts, you need to pay special attention to their design. Add more images to your materials, infographics, and videos. Make a list of the best materials and announcements in the most prominent place on the site. Then there is a chance that the user will spend more time on the site.
3. Install plugins and widgets to integrate the site and the company’s social networks-such as widgets for subscribing, sharing content (“Share”), “Like” buttons, the ability to leave comments, sign in through a social network account, participate in polls, send messages, and so on.

Conclusion

If you want to establish contact with potential customers, then social networks are the most appropriate platform. It is convenient for users to receive information, and for companies to maintain communication using various formats and tools. In addition, it is a fairly universal channel, which is suitable for small and medium-sized businesses as well as large corporations.