What is SMM and why is it needed
The number of social network users is steadily increasing every day. According to recent studies, about 60% of all inhabitants of our planet use social networks. On average, people spend here about 2 hours a day, find interesting goods, services, useful and informative information. That is why social networks can be considered as an effective platform for developing your own business. The matter remains for small — make it so that your personal pages attract the attention of representatives of the target audience.
SMM promotion is designed to cope with the solution of the task. Now let's dwell in more detail on what SMM is, what benefits you can appreciate in practice from using it. We will also consider the difficulties of such promotion, which you may encounter in practice, and define its goals. We will also consider a number of tasks that SMM specialists will face. We will suggest tools that will help you work effectively and safely with social networks, including in the process of promoting your own business accounts in them.
A brief introduction to SMM
SMM (Social Media Marketing), aka social media marketing — a tool to achieve business goals in the social network. To solve this problem, different platforms can be used, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Tiktok, etc.
The set of activities that includes SMM includes:
- adding content to accounts in order to provide users with maximum information about your brand, products, services, competitive advantages and values;
- attracting new subscribers to personal pages, which can be considered as potential consumers of your product;
- active communication with the audience, quick answers to questions about products, services;
- launching different types of advertising in social networks;
- Introducing a new brand to the market, as well as promoting the image of an existing one.
Also, the set of measures necessarily includes an analysis of the results of the work performed in order to determine their effectiveness. Based on the data obtained, it is possible to make adjustments to the chosen strategy to obtain better results.
Who should use SMM promotion
Social networks – these are platforms where people find something interesting, useful for themselves. Want — they subscribe to this profile, they want— leave comments, want to make a purchase. And through social networks, you can make acquaintances, find out as many details as possible about competitors, establish business relationships, and find potential partners. Therefore, it is definitely impossible to say who needs social media marketing. It will be indispensable for any online and offline store, local brand and large retail chains, representatives of the tourism business, medical centers, etc.
But, the effectiveness of SMM promotion will be high and bring the desired results only if everything is implemented as correctly and correctly as possible. Not always the business owner can cope with the task on his own. Unfortunately, there are many nuances here that can play a trick on you: instead of the desired effect, you can simply ruin the reputation of your own brand.
That is why SMM promotion is approached as comprehensively and professionally as possible. In the modern labor market, the services of people who specialize exclusively in social media marketing are already widely represented. But, even if you entrust the maintenance of your accounts to SMMs, it is important to be aware of what is happening yourself in order to control the work and get the most out of your investment.
What are the benefits of SMM promotion for business?
Let's give a number of points that can be attributed to the strengths of SMM promotion:
- Increasing the level of trust in the brand by representatives of the target audience. Social networks can become a reliable foundation in building audience confidence in a certain business. The fact that the company is represented in the most popular networks constantly talks about itself, creates relevant content, communicates with customers, shares profitable offers — this automatically increases the level of trust, indicates that the business is working and developing. It is important to organize the work of your accounts so that representatives of the target audience can get the most competent and quick advice online. This point is very relevant, since the number of people who want to communicate with managers by phone is constantly decreasing — most people today prefer online communication.
- Informing customers quickly and efficiently. Provides literally instant audience information about a new product, promotional offers, company news. And a person can follow all this from the phone, take screenshots of products, ask questions, save publications with the above description of the service, etc. Modern social networks are turning into a huge notebook with a set of useful contacts that anyone can access.
- Increased brand loyalty and awareness. By bringing your business online, you are not primarily promoting individual products, but your name. And if under this name there is a really high-quality and attractive product from a material point of view, then people will begin to recognize it, share information with friends and acquaintances. This will be the moment when you no longer work for the name, but the name works for you. The closest connection between business and target audience — This is an additional comfort for both the client and the store itself. Constant interaction with people shows them that you are really aimed at the prospect — long and fruitful cooperation.
- Easier and more efficient communication. How do you know if buyers appreciate your product or, on the contrary, criticize it? Not everyone decides to leave a review on the site itself. A simpler and more convenient solution — These are social media comments. Review them regularly and you will know what customers really think about your product.
What difficulties can you face with SMM promotion?
Before you start SMM promotion, you need to understand that working with social networks — this is not a one-time event. You will have to constantly work on your pages. And this will require a lot of free time from you. It is necessary to constantly create new content, paying attention to its usefulness for representatives of the target audience, set up advertising, solve certain technical problems, and actively communicate with the audience. For a small business and limited resources, SMM can be quite a difficult task to implement.
You also need to understand that not all reviews about your products or services will be positive. Moreover, not all of them will be objective. Have you heard the expression how many people, so many opinions? And each person can express this opinion in the comments to your product or service. And the most unpleasant in all this — that everyone will see it. But on their basis, the general opinion of people about a new project, brand, product or service is formed. It is not uncommon for social media platforms to be referred to as online complaint books. Practice shows that people who are satisfied with a product or service do not write reviews as often as everyone who does not like your products.
So how do you deal with negative reviews? The most efficient and effective solution — perform a thorough check of your business based on the information received from the buyer, identify problem areas and eliminate them. In no case do not delete complaints, and also do not leave them unattended. Give the dissatisfied client a calm response containing a sincere desire to help and understand the situation that has arisen. Perhaps if the product turned out to be of poor quality, offer to replace it with another one. All this will indicate that your company has some values and you are trying to adhere to them in practice.
Another thing you need to know about before launching an SMM promotion is that the result from it will not be fast. You will have to wait. Even if you invited a professional designer and marketer, developed a unique strategy, launched an account, there will be no instant effect. The success of your actions can only be assessed after a certain period of time. And all these weeks you will have to work hard on creating new content, actively communicate with subscribers, etc. It will be very convenient to connect a tool for evaluating the effectiveness of publishing on social networks to your work. This way you can compare reach and metrics before and after the campaign was launched.
Practice shows that with the right approach, a positive result is guaranteed, even after a while.
Goals that professional SMM promotion will solve
If you decide to give a new start to the development of your business, to convey your goods or services to users of social networks, then you cannot do without SMM promotion. The effectiveness of all the measures taken will directly depend on how professionally and correctly your strategy will be built. That is, you need to clearly understand where the project will go and what can be obtained as a result of the work performed.
Among the main goals set by marketing in social networks, we highlight:
- Increased sales. Most of the business representatives in the transition to social networks pursue this goal. And this is quite logical and justified, because there are many opportunities to present your product to the maximum number of users in the most favorable light.
- Increase awareness. Using SMM methods, you can increase the number of people who are familiar with your brand and its values. This will be especially true for those who occasionally introduce new products to the market, as well as those who have only recently joined social networks. We have already said that the entire subsequent promotion strategy will be based on the recognition of your name.
- Reputation. Unlike the previous version, not only recognition is important here, but also a positive response. That is, this goal will allow you to understand what exactly your brand is associated with in social networks, what people say about it, whether they trust it.
- Create effective communication with representatives of the target audience. Discussion of goods and services, a call to express an opinion about purchased products in the comments, providing useful information and answers to those questions that interest users, memes, interesting pictures of the – this is only part of what is encouraged by the target audience and encourages them to communicate with your business.
- Increase site traffic. Attracting traffic loss – it is one of the important components of online trading. The more people you can attract to your resource through social networks, the greater the number of purchases will be.
But, regardless of what goal your business pursues, the effectiveness of the implementation of the task in hand directly depends on the professionalism of specialists and an integrated approach.
Should I involve a SMM manager?
We have already said that SMM promotion — not such an easy task as it might seem at first glance. You can hardly get by with periodic publications and attractive photos. This is especially true for those business representatives who set themselves fairly large-scale and serious tasks. The fact is that SMM marketing — this is a rather complicated and complex technology, which SMM specialists thoroughly understand. They know how to properly draw up a content plan, study the target audience, set up advertising, and analyze the competitor market. And the most important thing— this is that these works must be performed exclusively for your business, that is, for each project.
The duties of an SMM specialist will include the following work:
- Create content for social networks. He will come up with all the topics that should be of interest to representatives of your target audience.
- Publishing texts, photos, videos and other content. It's about creating interesting solutions that can effectively set you apart from the competition.
- Improving the visual part of the account. Often, an SMM specialist works together with a designer or a photographer. It is he who prescribes the terms of reference for them, which will need to be implemented.
- Comment moderation. An SMM specialist will answer user questions, help resolve conflict situations, and provide clarifications.
- Establishing contacts with bloggers, opinion leaders, influencers. At the moment, it will be relevant for the business for which advertising from Internet celebrities will be effective.
- Developing a strategy. Here, the specialist prescribes all the points that need to be implemented to promote your business in social networks, and also indicates the approximate time frame for achieving the desired results. Calculations are also performed here and the cost of these works is indicated.
- Immediate promotion. Along with the placement of various content, an SMM specialist will also set up paid advertising, think over contests, etc. He will also constantly monitor SMM promotion statistics, namely, how many customers came to your business as a result of its activities, which of the tools gave the most impressive result, etc.
Increasing the effect of SMM promotion
The effectiveness of promotion in social networks directly depends on how many accounts are used in the work. Having only one page at your disposal, you will not be able to reach the target audience as much as possible and achieve your goal. But, social networks react extremely negatively to the simultaneous work of a user from different accounts. They easily identify the IP-address from which the page is being worked on, and if similarities are found, the accounts are immediately blocked . This completes your work with SMM promotion, and all the invested funds will be wasted.
So what to do in this situation? One of the most simple, convenient and efficient solutions — additional use of mobile proxies in the MobileProxy.Space service. These are dynamic servers that will change their own IP-addresses either by a timer in the interval from 2 minutes to 1 hour, or by force via a link from your personal account. In this case, the latter option will be more preferable for you. That is, we worked with one account, changed the IP-address and proceed to work with another page. Thanks to this, no anti-fraud system identifies your multi-threaded actions, which means you can avoid a ban. In addition, you can additionally use tools to automate actions in social networks, including when parsing data (for these works, you can use the Nightmare library).
To learn more about the functionality of mobile proxies from the MobileProxy.Space service, follow the link https://mobileproxy.space/user .html?buyproxy. You can also take advantage of a free two-hour test to make sure that the product is highly effective and convenient even before you buy it. Thanks to the round-the-clock technical support service, all questions that arise in your workflow will be resolved as quickly and professionally as possible.
Learn how to start SSM promotion here.