Social platforms for promotion. I am often asked

All progressive entrepreneurs are engaged in promoting their business on social networks. They create brand profiles on various platforms. Beginners do not quite understand in which social network they can achieve maximum results. On the one hand, you can try several options at once. This increases the chances of achieving your goal. On the other hand, promoting several accounts will require significant financial investments.

That is why it is important to choose the optimal social network suitable for a specific case. Before choosing one option or another, follow these steps:

Analyze your target audience;
Analyze the company's products/services;
Conduct a competitor analysis.

What social network is your audience on?

This article will discuss 5 popular platforms at once:

VKontakte;
Facebook;
Instagram;
YouTube;
Classmates.

If you are looking for a target audience by age, you can go to any social network. In this regard, they do not differ noticeably from each other. But if you focus on finding female users, then it is better to promote on Instagram or Odnoklassniki.

If you are looking for an audience between 12 and 24 years old, remember that such users prefer the social network VKontakte and the popular video hosting YouTube. Look for users under 34 years old on Facebook. For an older audience, visit Odnoklassniki.

VKontakte

On this platform, business is promoted through advertising, communities and public pages. In the VKontakte for Business public page you can find a lot of useful information about the tools and rules of online promotion.

The owner or administrator of the community can design the community at their discretion (choose a themed avatar, cover, add a product display, and much more). Buyers contact managers through community messages.

On VKontakte you can also order paid promotion using various advertising formats.

Classmates

Followers here are inexpensive, but the audience itself can boast of high purchasing power. In Odnoklassniki, it is best to trade products for everyday use. To make this idea a reality, it is enough to create a page or a separate brand group. What else does the platform offer for business promotion:

Promo posts;
TV Sync function (simultaneous display of advertising on TV and on a social platform);
Advertisements in the news feed.

Facebook

Speaking about the Russian-language version of Facebook, it is worth noting that businessmen, politicians, experts and programmers like to sit on it. These users often purchase mid-range and premium products. Facebook offers advertisers comfortable working conditions. Here you can easily set up targeted advertising, as well as segment the target audience. To promote your business on Facebook, you can create a brand profile or a separate group.

Is there at least a fly in the ointment in all this? Yes, there is one. If you launch a promotional post from a page or group, it will not appear in the news feed. And to communicate with clients you have to use comments.

As for the news feed, it is possible to get there. But you'll have to pay for it.

Instagram

This is where you can find a huge audience between the ages of 18 and 29. This platform has become one of the favorite places for entrepreneurs from all over the world. Local users are loyal to advertising of any kind. Here you can sell handicrafts, branded clothing, cosmetics, as well as promote beauty salon services and much more.

All of these are extremely popular with Instagrammers as brands can make a beautiful statement about themselves and their products through visual content.

The Stories tool is a real boon for entrepreneurs. With their help, you can talk about important events, while reaching a large audience of subscribers.

Instagram boasts detailed statistics. At any time the user has the opportunity to review the information:

Impressions;
Coverage;
Audience involvement.

Additionally, you can view user demographics, their activity, and the most popular posts of all time.

YouTube

To successfully promote a brand on video hosting, you will need relevant content. In what format to submit your entries to subscribers is a personal matter for everyone. The owner (or his assistant) of a YouTube channel can upload promotional videos with various calls to action, or write a vlog about the “behind the scenes” of the brand.

Orders InStream, which allows you to broadcast advertising in other people's videos;
Orders InDisplay - gets the opportunity to take pride of place in search results.

Conclusion

Before choosing the final version of a social platform for business promotion, you need to carefully evaluate and analyze everything. Remember that everything in this world is individual.

Much depends on the target audience and the laws by which the social platform “lives”.

If you sell products that you can realistically advertise visually, use Instagram. Facebook is the perfect place for luxury products. If you sell everyday products for adults, go to Odnoklassniki. Do you want to find a young and active audience? Then create content for YouTube and VK.

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It took radio 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million, television 13. Facebook gained 200 million users in less than a year.

More than 82% of Internet users have accounts on social networks and spend (at least) two hours a day on them. Russia ranks first in Europe in terms of popularity of social networks.

There is a growing number of users who come to social networks not for communication, but for information, as well as businessmen who understand that social media is an effective marketing channel. If you want to promote a project through social networks, then get acquainted with four effective ways of promotion.

Content is the main factor of promotion

Any SMM specialist will confirm: without quality content, promotion tools are useless. If your brand’s page is boring, you shouldn’t count on audience growth and loyalty.

Three components of good content:

Uniqueness. The information you post should be relevant and engaging. Do not copy materials from other resources. The exception is cross-posting between a company’s blog and its page on a social network.
Regularity. Articles should be published systematically. Two, three, four or seven times a week - depends on the specifics of the business and its target audience. So, for people from the business environment, two or three updates will be enough, but for the beauty community this is clearly not enough. It is necessary to adhere to the chosen content strategy regardless of the number of subscribers.
Virality. Publications should be lively, evoking an emotional response in the form of a burning desire to tell friends about them. Avoid overtly promotional posts.

Facebook in Russia- “social services are not for everyone.” It is used by marketers, programmers and other IT-savvy people. They are not afraid of a “complex interface”, and their areas of interest include gadgets, the Internet, travel, education, books and business in all its forms. They willingly like and share materials on these topics, as well as motivating articles that set the mood for positivity. Most of Facebook's active audience uses the mobile application - it is recommended to illustrate posts with pictures measuring 800 × 600.

"VKontakte"- the largest social network on the Runet (more than 230 million registered users). Her audience is younger; Users' interests are mainly focused on entertainment (communication, games, music, movies, etc.). VK users do not like text content (it is advisable that the length of the post does not exceed 500 characters), but they love photos and videos.

The most popular among photo hosting sites in Russia is Instagram. At the same time, when maintaining a brand page on Instagram, it is recommended to adhere to a single design style (use not only standard filters, but also third-party photo editors), and also place objects in the photo on 2/3 of the screen (this makes the picture more visually attractive).

Targeting

The ability to place targeted advertising is available on almost all social networks: VKontakte, Facebook, Odnoklassniki and others. At the same time, it is believed that targeted advertising on social networks is more suitable for the B2C sector. However, there are also companies in B2B that effectively solve business problems through targeted advertising.

Some types of targeting:

Geographic (geotargeting) - displaying advertising to residents of a certain region / city / district, etc. For example, you want to promote a beauty salon located in Khimki near Moscow. Your targeted ad will be shown to residents of this city.
Socio-demographic - displaying advertising depending on gender, age, marital status and other social criteria. Thus, it is recommended to place advertisements for children's products and household goods on the pages of married women over 25, and advertisements for an art store - on the pages of designers, architects, and decorators.
Contextual - displaying advertising in accordance with the user's interests. Membership in groups such as “Fashion”, Fashion, “Shopping”, etc. clearly demonstrates the user’s interests. He will be interested in relevant advertising.
Behavioral - displaying advertising depending on specific user actions (travel routes, favorite places, frequent search queries, etc.). Let's say a person is interested in Latin American dancing, goes to a salsa club, and looks for relevant videos - there is a high probability that he will be attracted by an advertisement for a last-minute tour to Cuba.

Despite its apparent simplicity, targeting is a tool that requires serious preparatory work. First, you need to analyze the brand's target audience. Secondly, make an ad.

Advertising in communities

Advertising in communities (in the professional language of SMM specialists - sowing) is the purchase of posting posts or reposts in popular communities. In the first case (purchase of a post), the advertiser’s goal is to increase traffic on the company’s website; in the second (buying a repost) - attracting users to the company’s group on a social network. Moreover, the more subscribers the community in which you buy a post has, the more expensive the advertising campaign will cost.

You can negotiate with community owners directly or use the services of a special exchange. In 2013, it was opened by the social network VKontakte (an account for advertisers). Advertising is placed by the community administration in its feed and, according to the conditions, must remain there for 24 hours.

Professional promotion in social media

This refers to services that provide paid promotion services on social networks. As a rule, they independently create high-quality content, launch a targeting mechanism and negotiate advertising in communities. These include Plibber. Why conditional? Because the capabilities of this service are much wider.

register;
decide on the format of work on the site (you can advertise your brand yourself or contact the Plibber team to organize a shocking advertising campaign);
prepare an advertising post;
select the most suitable sites from the target audience and begin sowing.

After preliminary moderation, your task will be available and you can start attracting fans of your brand.

How to get organic loyal traffic? We addressed this question, which is of interest to all advertisers, to the founder of the Plibber project, Oleg Ratunin.

Oleg Ratunin

CEO and ideological inspirer of Plibber.ru. Knows everything and more about social media.

To attract potential fans to your brand, you should:

use quizzes, infographics, illustrations, viral videos, advertising games, etc.;
place a link within the visible area of the post announcement (first and second lines);
introduce a call to action into the content;
add a provocative survey;
work with associative content format and its adaptation to the brand;
launch creative, vibrant and unique competitions.

If you manage to find the content that your audience craves, you can count on over 600 clicks from one post.

Also, do not forget to analyze the communication of large brands with their subscribers; now good results are being detected in the community

Please tell me where you are promoting yours? On Facebook, Vkontakte, Twitter and Instagram? Not bad! Social networks are great for promoting anything, but you must understand that they are unlikely to do it alone, and that something more is needed to grow traffic.

Calm down, don't panic. We just want to remind you that there are other good platforms where you can and should also talk about your website. There are quite a lot of them, so read, try and take note.

YouTube

No, this is not entertainment for schoolchildren and grandmothers. Adults and serious people look here for information about new companies, launches, products and celebrities. This resource has more than a billion users, and you may well attract the attention of some of them with your videos. But remember that the competition here is incredibly high, so your entries should never be boring and banal. Don't know what to tell your audience? Get started with helpful tips and training videos. Even a small number of views will increase your website traffic! And one more bonus: your videos will appear in search engines, people will start viewing them, sending them to their friends, and maybe even publishing them on their blogs or social networks.

Questions and Answers Services

Have you heard about the sites Quora or TheQuestion? There you can ask any question and get a hundred answers - both from random people and from experts. These services are extremely popular, so it may be worth your while to explore them. By the way, they occupy very good positions in search results - due to good traffic, an abundance of keywords and regular updates. Just in case, let us remind you that these are not advertising platforms - it is customary here to exchange knowledge, but not to sell your product. Therefore, get to know other users, write meaningful comments, but do not forget to indicate the address of your site in the signature, because the more links to your resource on the Internet, the higher its traffic.

Find a couple of popular companies similar to yours and start meeting and communicating with them on their social networks. Marketing and promotion experts believe that this should be done at least half an hour a week. As you can see, quite a bit, so why not try it? Find worthy candidates with interesting, meaningful content, be active, and after a while their audience will begin to be interested in you.

Online directories, catalogs, review services

Be sure to add your site to popular directories like 2GIS and Yandex.Directory. Don't forget about review services, for example, Flamp or AlterGeo. You can also search for specialized directories in your area, for example, a directory with hotels in your region, and enter your data there.

Mailings

Do you think letters are a thing of the past? Nothing like that, newsletters are a 100% hit of the season. Many brands successfully use them to communicate with their audience - sharing ideas, useful tips, or simply telling how things are going. Our advice: don’t delay and launch it as soon as possible, especially since you have it! Remember that emails should be interesting and make people want to go to the site. Don't know what to write about? Tell us about a new product or update, a new blog post, a sale or a competition. But don’t limit yourself to writing only when something happens to you. You can simply congratulate your customers on the upcoming holiday and give them a discount coupon. We don't know people who don't love attention and gifts.

Blogs

The best place to talk to people and introduce them to your brand. If you decide to start one, do not forget that the posts should be unique, interesting and relevant. There is no need to write everything that comes to mind; it is better to stick to the topic of your business. By the way, we regularly share useful

Have you written a high-quality post, but it went unnoticed? Have you created a great infographic, but no one has ever shared it? Spent six months creating a useful white paper, but no one downloads it? If your content is really that great, but it still doesn't resonate with your audience, it can only mean one thing - you're not paying enough attention to promoting your content.

Creating content and promoting it should take approximately the same amount of time. Sharing a post on several social networks is not enough! You should use all possible platforms and methods to ensure the greatest reach of your target users. Only in this case can you count on a viral effect.

In today's article, I will look at the most popular and effective platforms for promoting new blog posts and share with you my own experience in using them. If you find the material useful, we will be grateful for your reposts.

Free distribution methods

1. VKontakte

2. Facebook

3. Classmates

The most popular social networks among the Russian-speaking audience with huge traffic potential for almost any business. I won’t tell you how to promote on these sites - everyone already knows how to do it very well. I will give just a few design tips, without which it is very difficult to achieve at least some serious results:

Make a beautiful decoration for your group. Draw a beautiful avatar, cover for the group, navigation menu (if this is a VKontakte page, use wiki markup). A group that is beautifully designed inspires much more trust among users.

Choose a large and bright picture for the announcement every time. It should attract attention and force the user to linger on it.

Try to write announcements that encourage people to click on the link.. Describe in a nutshell what the article is about, provide an interesting fact or excerpt, and intrigue the reader.

Shorten all long links. This can be done using the following services: bitly or google url shortener.
Use hashtags. We wrote in great detail about how hashtags work on different social networks in this article.

20. Medium

Medium is a platform for publishing and discovering interesting content. Figuratively speaking, this is the same as Youtube, only for text content. Thanks to the algorithm, higher quality and interesting articles (those that receive the most views and recommendations) rise above other materials in the feed.

To add your article, you need to register and click New story. In principle, you can copy an already published article from your blog, but in this case you must add it to the “Original Texts” of Yandex and indicate Google authorship. If you don't do this, your site may get filtered for having duplicate content.

Despite the fact that this platform is still distributed mostly only abroad, there is a section where exclusively Russian-language content is published (link is provided above). It currently has 342 subscribers. It’s still small, but the platform is developing quickly, and there is a possibility that in the future it will become more popular in RuNet.

21. Snip.ly

A very cool service, but still not very widespread in RuNet. Its meaning is as follows: you find some high-quality material on your topic on the Internet (so high-quality that you can definitely say that your users will like it), add it to snip.ly, enter your material into it (like this is done, it will be clear from the screenshot below) and share the link with your users.

As a result, you use high-quality content from sites on similar topics and carefully promote your content. For example, you can take content from the Forbes website and recommend your own equally useful publication to it. Overall, it's a worthwhile tool, especially for those who don't have much of their own content. Here, by the way, is the traffic that this site brings us (taking into account the fact that until recently we had never heard of it):

22. Foursquare

The social network Foursquare is not exactly designed for publishing content, but despite this, I still decided to include it in the review. Why? In 2014, Foursquare had an audience of more than 50 million people worldwide. In Russia, this social network is also very popular, especially among the younger segment of the population. The essence of this service is very simple: you visit some establishment and use your phone to make a note that you were there (“check in”). At the same time, you can take a photo, add your comment about this establishment and even give it a rating.

Who should pay attention to Foursquare first?

To shops
Bars, cafes, restaurants
Entertainment and shopping centers
Beauty salons and hairdressers
Medical centers and any other business with retail outlets

At the beginning of this paragraph, I said that this social network is not entirely intended for publishing content, but this does not mean that it is completely impossible to publish it there. Here you can post special offers that are valid in your establishment, announcements of events or news related to your brand. You can read more about how to work with this social network.

23. Slideshare

Slideshare is one of the favorite platforms for internet marketers. If you are not yet registered on this social network, I advise you to fix this as soon as possible. Presentations are one of the most beloved types of content by the audience, because... they allow you to convey complex information in the simplest and most interesting way. In addition, the service’s audience is simply huge – up to 60 million unique visitors come to Slideshare per month.

24. Forums

Live thematic forums are powerful platforms for promoting your content. The only condition that must be observed when placing your link on them is that you must make sure that it does not seem advertising. If you succeed and you can help users solve their problem, you will get approval and traffic. If not, then most likely you will simply be banned. In our practice, forums give us quite a lot of traffic. As a rule, links to our content are left not by us, but by users. Here are just a few examples of such publications and statistics on the traffic that came from them:

Mention of our article about the uniqueness of content on the Advego forum

The user specifically created a separate topic so that others would read our article and rate it. The material received quite a lot of comments (not surprising) and also generated a fair amount of traffic:

Mention of our articles on the Searchengines.guru forum

What’s interesting is that we didn’t put a single link on purpose. All 99 mentions came from forum users, which once again confirms the idea that high-quality (or provocative) content will always find its way to the masses. Here's what it gave us in terms of traffic:

Mention of our article about gamification of content on the Procrastinator forum

And traffic from it:

In case you don't know what forums are available in your niche, try Googling the following phrase – inurl:forum “keyword”. For example:

25. Comments on articles

Comments on articles are another effective way to promote your publications. To find relevant commenting resources, Google a popular keyword related to your article. For example, I once wrote an article “30 bookmarklets useful in the work of an Internet marketer.” I Googled the word “bookmarklets”, found an article on the very popular lifehacker resource – “The most useful bookmarklets for your browser” and left a comment there.

After that, one or two users began to steadily come to our site from the moment of publication to the present day.

Another example of a successful comment belongs to Denis Savelyev. Moreover, he left it not for the purpose of promoting the article, but simply to prove his point. The fact is that the commentators on this article did not believe that Denis’s article was published completely free of charge in Forbes. I had to prove it.

Well, the last example. Article on Silicone “29 free services for every Internet marketer.” Now there are only 2 comments, because the site was redesigned and the comments were deleted. At the time I left my comment there, there were a lot of them. And the top one was like this (with 17 likes):

Without hesitation, I commented on the top comment so that my comment would not fall to the very bottom, where no one would see it:

In a couple of days, more than 200 unique visitors came to our site. Plus the traffic continued to flow for some time after that. I shared this technique in one of the articles on our blog and received the following comment:

26. Guest posts

This method is difficult to use for every new post published on your blog, but sometimes it is necessary to do it. Its essence is as follows: you write a guest article in which you provide a link to your new material from the blog, agree on publication, and then receive referrals to your site for a long time. I say “for a long time” for a reason. When we first started seriously developing our blog, we actively engaged in guest posting. We wrote to bloggers specializing in our topics and prepared unique and useful articles for them. Quite a lot of time has passed since then, but traffic from their sites continues to flow to us.

Here, for example, is how much traffic Siliconrus, a resource popular among Internet marketers, gives us annually:

The article we published there is “How to create a profitable online agency in three years? " And they did it absolutely free, although many don’t believe it. We found contacts and suggested an article. I liked the material and published it immediately. The same thing happened with Forbes. There we published two articles - “Why asceticism is valuable for business” and “Kill the startuper in you: why new projects die.” It’s interesting that people don’t believe that you can get onto such sites for free, but with our example we have twice proven the opposite. If the text is good, interesting, catchy and created for the target audience of a specific site, it will be accepted without any money.

If you don't know what blogs are popular in your niche, try using the following operator - inurl:blog "keyword".

27. Blogging Platforms

Whatever business you are in, there are probably communities in your niche where any registered user can post their materials. Here are some examples of such sites:

Risk.ru – a community dedicated to extreme sports
Bikepost.ru – a community of motorcycle enthusiasts
Venividi.ru – a community dedicated to travel

How to promote content in these communities? You can write a short post with the most interesting photos or ideas, and at the end provide a link to more detailed material from your blog. You can even advertise your products, as was done, for example, in one of the posts on risk.ru. First there is a review of the new series of backpacks, and then a link to the page where these backpacks can be bought.

If the post is made correctly, it will not cause negativity. And if it turns out to be useful to users, it will even get shares and comments.

28. Newsletter

A base of engaged and loyal subscribers is another channel for receiving targeted traffic to your new blog materials. Announce each new post, as, for example, CMSmagazine does:

If your subscriber base is not purchased. If all of these people subscribed to you completely voluntarily and expect to see your content in their inboxes, this tactic will get you a lot of good traffic. If you look at the screenshot below, you will see that every Monday (the day when we send out our newsletter) we have a consistently small influx of traffic to the site:

29. Mail.ru answers

30. Big question

31. Toster

32. Bigmir

Questions and answers services. Today, there are a huge number of various services where you can ask questions and get answers to them. Above I have listed only a few of them, in my opinion, the most popular.

Try to look for the most popular questions on your topic and give a good detailed answer to them with a link to material from your blog. Well, if there are no questions on your topic yet, create them yourself (for this you will need to create two accounts - one for the question, the other for the answer).

33. Aggregator sites

By aggregator sites I mean sites that often publish other people’s content on their pages with a link to the source. In our niche, one of such sites is Cossa.ru. We've already written about the value of this resource in , so now I'll just say one thing: this site is an excellent source of targeted traffic (provided you post quality materials on it). Here is a screenshot confirming my words:

Another aggregator site in our area can be called CMSMagazine. It so happened that we collaborated with the guys from this site for some time and we developed, well, not exactly friendly, but quite positive relationships. I don’t know if this played a role or something else, but from that moment on, the editors of CMSMagazine began to pay attention to our articles and publish them on their website, for which I, taking this opportunity, once again express my deep gratitude to them.

Not a penny was paid for any of this material. The guys themselves chose their favorite publications and republished them on their website. One time I offered them material that, in my opinion, could arouse great interest among their audience and bring us a lot of traffic. Here it is - “Website promotion with a zero budget: 65 steps to conquer the search TOPs for free

Here is the traffic that articles from CMSMagazine brought us:

34. Groups on social networks

If you are interested in the topic of your business (and you must be), then you probably know which groups on social networks are most popular among your target audience. Find these groups and invite them to publish your new material. Most likely, many of them will refuse you or ask you for money, but some may agree. Often we don’t even try to contact the site owners, only because we are a priori sure that they will not publish your content or will demand payment for it. And in vain - often our expectations turn out to be false. Here is an example of how we tried this advice in practice and what it led to:

35. Blogger Mentions

A very clever way to get traffic. Personally, I have never used it (in our field it is very difficult to disguise the greedy overtones), but I am absolutely sure that it will give results in other niches. Its meaning is this. You write a great and high-quality article. In it, you mention the most famous bloggers in your niche (be sure to leave the link open). Then you write to each of them, tell them that you included a link to their article in your material, and ask them to read it if they are interested. The text of the letter may be as follows:

Hello, Sergey

My name is Ivan Ivanov, I am the host of the blog blog.ru.

Thanks again for the quality materials! Your blog is one of the few that I read with great interest.

Best regards, Ivan Ivanov

It’s not a fact that after reading your letter he will immediately share your post, but the chances are very high. In our practice, there were quite a lot of such cases. The material “” (infographics) gave us especially a lot of traffic, in which we mentioned almost all famous bloggers and specialists in our niche.

We are all “vain sons of bitches,” as Niyaz Garayev put it :), and that’s normal. When Texterra is mentioned in some cool materials, we also share it with our subscribers. We promote ourselves and offer useful material. Everyone wins.

36. Block “We are quoted”

Some sites have a special block that lists links to materials that mention the domain name of these sites. It looks like this:

Thanks to this block, target users periodically come to our website:

If you notice such a feature on one of the popular sites in your field, try using it for your own purposes. Just keep in mind that the mention of the site should be natural, and the article should be of really high quality and useful. Otherwise, this method will not give you anything good.

37. Digests

A digest is a selection of useful materials published over the past week or month. Typically, this type of content resonates well with the audience and makes them eagerly await the next episode. Another undeniable advantage of digests is that they take little time to create (if, of course, you constantly view thematic blogs and save the content you like). An example of such a digest: