Social networks in the modern world are an integral part of every person’s life. At least people spend several hours a day on resources such as Facebook, Odnoklassniki, VKontakte, Instagram, and so on. They communicate there, look for information, post their own photos, evaluate photos of other people, share their impressions, arrange meetings and much more. The modern world is simply impossible to imagine without social networks, and this is also what marketers have noticed. As a result, they decided to use social networks as an advertising tool, and this turned out to be a very reasonable solution. And for several years now, social media marketing has been one of the most popular and sought after business in the world. And if you still do not use it, then this article is for you. You will learn about what social media marketing is, how it has evolved, how you will competently enter this area of advertising and use the existing resource at the maximum level. You can be sure that this information will not remain useless for you, since in the current century of high technology, Internet marketing is exactly what every enterprise is going to.
What it is?
So, first of all, you need to understand what marketing in social networks is. It is quite possible that you have seen the abbreviation SMM, which just indicates its present form. This stands for Social Media Marketing. It translates exactly the way you might think - "social media marketing." But what is he like? This is a type of marketing, the activity of which is focused exclusively on numerous social networks, which are now one of the most popular Internet resources for any age category. Promotion of any brand through social networks guarantees you an impressive influx of the target audience. But at the same time, you should understand that this area is quite young, so no one will offer you the perfect solution from the first steps. Compared to other types of advertising, which exist for dozens and even hundreds of years, content marketing on social networks appeared less than ten years ago, a couple of years after the organization and rise of social networks as such. But what can attract this type of marketing?
Reasons for attractiveness
Content marketing on social networks may seem unusual and rather difficult for you, as it is a very complex mechanism that you need to know thoroughly. And so many businessmen are trying to the last to refuse it, not considering this option successful and useful enough in the light of the costs that it requires. And if you relate to such people, then you should familiarize yourself with some obvious advantages of this type of marketing.
Firstly, such marketing has a non-advertising format, that is, advertising information is transferred from one user of a social network to another, and this, according to research, interests users much more than ordinary advertising that they read on the site.
Secondly, word of mouth is the most relevant here. You do not need to distribute information among each user of the social network. If you create high-quality content, users themselves will be happy to distribute it between their acquaintances and friends on the network.
Thirdly, in social networks there is the possibility of advertising targeting, that is, targeting it precisely to the target audience that is most likely to be interested in your product. This can significantly reduce costs and increase the return on advertising.
And finally, a huge advantage is interactivity, as users can easily ask their question at any time after reading an advertising message, and you can answer him at any time to attract him and motivate him to buy.
As you can see, social media SMM marketing can be incredibly useful for your business. It does not require large expenses, but gives huge advantages in the advertising market and is extremely convenient to use. At the same time, you should understand that strategy is the key to success. Given the availability of this tool, a lot of people try to use it, but in most cases this leads to failure, creating negative statistics and a frightening experience. But if you are serious about this issue, then you can get yourself an incredible marketing tool.
When to use?
The first thing you should understand is whether SMM marketing on social networks will be effective just for you. In fact, only some types of business, such as, say, specialized B2B enterprises or taxi services, will not be very successful when using social media marketing. But in the case of large enterprises, as in the case of medium or small companies, SMM is a great choice, which, of course, will not be the only form of advertising, but it can be a great addition. By the way, marketing can turn into something more, because many social media platforms now allow you to make transactions right there, that is, you can make sales through social networks. In addition, you will have access to such interesting opportunities as branding, that is, working on a brand image, increasing the quantity and improving the quality of traffic on your website, as well as reputation marketing, that is, neutralizing any negative. Now you see what an indispensable tool is social media marketing. A book on this topic will definitely come in handy if you want to build a competent strategy, but if you do not want to waste time, then you just need to familiarize yourself with this article to begin activities in this direction.
History of social networks
If you still want to have some useful printed material on the topic, then Damir Khalilov’s book “Social Media Marketing” may come in handy. But you can get all the basic information from this article. Moreover, you will even learn about how social networks appeared. Many people think that they appeared at the beginning of the 2000s, but, as was said earlier, this was their heyday. They appeared in the mid-nineties, and the first social network was the Classmates project, which was then adapted for runet under the name Odnoklassniki. As for the nulls, the heyday began in 2003, when LinkedIn and MySpace broke into the Internet, followed by Facebook in 2004. As for Runet, here the flowering was late, but not for long. Already in 2006, the aforementioned Odnoklassniki and VKontakte immediately appeared - an analogue of the Western Facebook.
History of social media marketing
Now you have an idea of how social networks were born, so it's time to take a look at how marketing appeared there. Development in Russia began to gain momentum sometime in 2009, when social networks became more adapted for advertising, and not just for communication. Prior to this, companies already had their pages, but only posted news on them.In 2010, the integration of popular communities took place, which made viral marketing on social networks possible. In addition, any company was given the opportunity to create its own corporate page, which would represent either the entire enterprise or a specific brand. Even then, there were noticeable trends in the emergence of social media marketing, but 2011 was a decisive year. It was then that tools began to appear to track various kinds of statistics on social networks, which gave companies the opportunity to check the effectiveness of their advertising, to find out the opinions of users about the product, and so on. As a result, since 2012, the social media marketing market has begun to gain strength, and now everyone knows that this is one of the most popular and effective ways to advertise goods and services. Now there is social media marketing for photographers, bloggers, and for every line of business. And, of course, progress does not stop there.
Modern tendencies
Social media marketing and promotion is not a way of advertising that can take shape and remain static for a long time. In the world of high technology, everything changes very quickly, so if you want to enter the world of SMM, then you should know about some of the most relevant modern trends. For example, now almost every social network is changing and adapting in order to serve as a platform for effective marketing. Many social networks integrate with the Pinterest service, where you can save the image while maintaining the link to the original article, which significantly increases traffic. It is also worth noting that the promotion of the B2B segment is gaining great momentum in social networks, which in such circumstances is not very easy to advertise, but even with several hundred subscribers in the community, in this case, you can get an excellent result. In addition, it is worth paying attention to the partial blurring of boundaries between social networks. Previously, there was a fairly clear distinction: one social network was intended for cognition, the other for entertainment, the third for photos, the fourth for work, and so on. Today, everything has become much more flexible, which makes Internet marketing on social networks much more effective.
Marketing strategy
Well, it's time to plan your content marketing. Promotion strategies on social networks can be very diverse, but you should decide on the key moments of planning. First of all, you need to determine the target audience. Then set clear goals for the company. After that, you need to analyze various social networks and choose the ones that are best suited for your goals and objectives. Then you need to determine the behavioral characteristics of your audience and based on these data begin to develop a more detailed strategy. This includes determining the metric system and obtaining the necessary software to evaluate your campaign, determining the resources you need to conduct an effective advertising campaign, as well as developing a calendar plan for your campaign that will allow you to more clearly evaluate its effectiveness.
What should a marketing strategy include? Firstly, you need to choose in what format your brand will be presented on the social network. This can be a group, a community, or even a separate personal page. Secondly, you will need to work on motivation to join your group or to subscribe to your page. Thirdly, your tasks will also include positioning your community in the vast social network.Fourth, you must not forget that the page of your product, brand or company must be properly designed so that it attracts the attention of people and makes them stay there longer and study your offer. Fifth, you will need to promote your community, that is, advertise it on a social network. And sixth, you will also be required to manage the community, that is, control the behavior of subscribers, remove unwanted comments, answer questions, add new content, and so on.
Actually, this is a rather impressive amount of work, and that is why many companies turn to specialists in this field. However, free marketing on social networks also exists, so you can try to deal with this issue yourself, without the involvement of specialists. Fortunately, you can always evaluate the effectiveness of your activity and, if necessary, pour in certain funds in order to increase this efficiency.
Monitoring
A very important point in this type of marketing is monitoring. It can be done manually using the statistical tools that the social network offers for free, but it’s rather difficult to do this, and you will not get as much information as you would like. That is why you should pay attention to the numerous monitoring tools that have gained popularity along with the popularization of SMM marketing. With their help, you can do a lot, up to analyzing the activities of competitors, assessing the effectiveness of promotion and even timely detection and elimination of negativity.
Promotion Evaluation
Promotion effectiveness is what you should be guided by, because with this parameter you can understand how effective your advertising campaign is. There are a large number of criteria by which you can evaluate the effectiveness of promotion, among which you can distinguish the most important and popular, such as audience reach, number of visitors, subscribers and actions (likes, reposts, comments), the resonance created by the advertising campaign, and also the amount of traffic coming to your site through a social network.
Viral marketing
In the end, it is worth taking a look at a few important points that you should definitely use if you plan to conduct marketing on social networks. And the first thing every SMM marketer should think about is viral marketing. Everyone knows what a viral video is - a video that, when it appears on the network, begins to spread lightning fast on the Internet due to the fact that users who watch it share it with other users. Viral marketing works in exactly the same way, but this is not about video, but about your advertising content. And here it is very important to understand what guerrilla marketing in social networks is. And this is real art! Partisan marketing is the compilation of advertising messages in such a way that they are not perceived by users as advertising, but rather as a story that can be shared with others.
Website optimization
Well, another important move is to optimize your site not for search engines, but for social networks. The “Like” buttons and the like appear on the sites, which make it easy and simple to post information from the site on a social network, comments from social networks are integrated into sites, and much more.