The power of social networks: how not to be mistaken in choosing social networks to promote your business?
SMM promotion (that is, promoting a business on social networks) is far from a trend, today it is just a stern necessity. Why? Well, judge for yourself: the audience of social networks is growing exponentially, according to We Are Social and Hootsuite, in 2021 there are 4.20 billion social network users in the world.
Over the past 12 months, this figure has grown by 490 million, representing an increase of more than 13% year on year. Social networks in 2021 are used by 53.6% of the world’s population. Accordingly, when a business is looking for channels to reach its audience, going to social networks will be one of the most logical decisions.
But here’s the problem: today, if not the absolute majority of companies, then a lot of companies are engaged in SMM promotion, just not everyone is doing it right – this gives rise to a lot of problems, wasted budgets, as well as myths and misconceptions.
Therefore, the purpose of this article is precisely to tell and show how SMM of a healthy person works and what such promotion can really give a business. We analyze the basics, put everything in its place and organize the knowledge.
How to start promoting your business on social networks
How to choose a social network to promote your business
What content to publish on social networks
The most popular social networks for business promotion
What social network should you choose to promote your business?
How to start promoting your business on social networks
Before going to social networks, you need to determine the purpose of your stay there, the actual site where you will be located, come up with a USP (unique selling proposition), with which you will go there, and only after that you can start taking active steps.
Let’s talk in more detail today about where to start promoting up to the moment of physically creating communities on social networks.
Of course, it’s worth starting with the development of an SMM strategy. The strategy will help define the main goal of your social media presence.
To create an SMM strategy you need:
Conduct a competitive analysis. It is important to understand the level of competition, if there is an abundance of supply, then it will be more difficult to attract attention to your product. As I mentioned at the very beginning, today only the lazy does not climb on the social network, therefore there is competition in almost all areas and on all sites, in some cases it is colossal. Accordingly, in order to achieve our goal, we will have to defeat all competitors, and for this, we first need to understand what exactly competitors are offering.
We talked about how competitive analysis is carried out in social networks on the example of Instagram in this article – use it to your health.
Form a USP (unique selling proposition), in simple words, highlight your advantage from competitors, where you are better than others.
Determine the portrait of the target audience. Never skip this point, because this is the only way to understand how necessary the manufacturer’s product will be for potential customers.
Carry out the goals of your stay on social media. To do this, you first need to decide on the positioning format:
Positioning: by brand, by interest or mixed positioning. Typically, these pages are filled with useful content. Thus, a large target audience is gathered and after that the author of the account earns on commercial advertising.
Commercial positioning. The community is created for profit. Typically, such an account publishes a catalog of goods, works with reviews and questions.
Mixed positioning. Here you act as an expert, post useful and relevant content. Thus, you earn yourself a good reputation, which in the future will play on the decision to buy products / services from you.
The design of the community and filling it with content will depend on this. For example, if in the commercial community by brand you have to submit everything on behalf of the company, then in the community of interests, on the contrary, there should be more impersonal useful information, and advertising should appear very carefully.
And only after that do we move on to defining the goal. Why do you go to social networks, what kind of result do you want to get. However, they should not contradict previously defined criteria. So, you cannot aim to increase sales for a community of interest or for a community that is created to reduce costs. For example, the community of the mobile operator, which is created to handle negativity and reduce the load on the call center or my starbucks idea. Here you need to understand that they will not buy directly from the community page. Don’t expect this.
The most common goals are, of course, getting traffic and sales.
After defining a community goal, you need to think about how you will measure the extent to which it will be achieved. In other words, you need to define performance indicators (KPIs). For example, if your goal is to get traffic, then you can use these indicators.
So, we figured out the strategy, the next step is to select a site.