What is SMM marketing and how does it work? SMM marketing from A to Z.

What's happened SMM promotion? How can it be used effectively when promoting your website, your brand, your ideas, products and services?

Don't have a hundred rubles, but have a hundred friends.

This saying very accurately characterizes the essence SMM promotion.

Hello visitors. I decided to take a closer look at such phenomena as social networks, SMM promotion, SMO promotion and everything connected with it.

Social media are becoming increasingly popular on the Internet. Their number is growing every day. At the same time, the most popular ones register new users every day. A simple conclusion can be drawn from this. Social networks are becoming more influential and significant.

The question arises of how you can use them in your business, to advertise your services and products. Let's try to figure it out.

What is SMM promotion?

There are two terms

SMM (Social Media Marketing) promotion
SMO (Social Media Optimization) promotion

SMO promotion involves optimizing the site itself, filling it with interesting, high-quality content and ensuring comfortable addition of this information to social networks.

SMM promotion These are the actions of the marketer in the networks themselves. Participation in forums, discussions, posting publications, recommending interesting articles, events, activities to friends.

But in fact, these two terms are, in the vast majority of cases, synonymous. When people use them, they mean the same thing. Most often, work on the website and activity on social networks. It’s just that some masters use one term, others another, but everyone understands perfectly well what they are talking about.

Now let's move on to the definition. Purpose of SMM promotion similar to the goals of good old traditional SEO. But, if SEO promotion is aimed at interacting with a search engine, that is, with a program, then SMM promotion should influence people, take into account their psychology, mood, habits, interests. You also need to take into account which social network you want to advance in. Each network has its own characteristics, rules of conduct, and its own audience.

Benefits of SMM promotion.

Now let's discuss what advantages promotion on social networks has over traditional SEO promotion, contextual advertising and other types of promotion.

Low cost.

Attracting one visitor costs significantly less than using other methods. Low cost of entry into your business niche. Recruit friends, create your own group, event, cover an important event for you. You don't need to invest a lot of money for this. Basically, there are time costs to create information and bring it to the attention of potential customers of your goods and services.

High virus capacity.

In a short time, you can get thousands of visitors to your website due to the viral effect of spreading information. If you posted interesting material, then it can attract the attention of 10 people, they will share it with their friends, and friends of friends with theirs, and so on. And after a short time, this material was already viewed by thousands of people. When using traditional SEO, this is very difficult to achieve on an unpromoted site; when using contextual advertising, it will cost orders of magnitude more.

Good development prospects.

I repeat once again, social networks are actively developing. Almost all new Internet users in our time begin their acquaintance with the World Wide Web from some social network. And then, maybe they will use some search engine.

Low competition.

Disadvantages of SMM promotion.

Now let's talk about the main disadvantages inherent in promoting on social networks.

Undeveloped analytics.

It is very difficult to analyze the actions of visitors, where they came from, for what queries, and how they behaved on your page. There is no such data provided by analytics services such as Yandex.Metrica, Liveinternet or Google Analytics. There are general numbers, but we act well in this case, but in the other it’s not very difficult to say. This is determined by indirect signs and depends on the experience and intuition of the marketer.

Control by network moderators.

With high activity, you can easily fall out of favor. You may be blocked or your activities limited in some way. This happens differently in all social networks and you need to be well versed in all these rules and traditions in order to effectively promote your interests.

Availability of a well-promoted brand or website.

If you have a well-established brand, it is much easier to convey your information to potential clients. It is clear that it is much easier to gather readers on the page of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Dmitry Medvedev or Angelina Jolie than on the page of a mere mortal. Having a website with good traffic will also be a good help.

Need for administration.

To support the life of a social group one has to devote a lot of time. Especially if the group is large and has thousands of people. In this case, it is necessary to allocate a person for administration.

There is no possibility to accept payment.

Social networks do not allow you to accept payment for your services or products. During the time when a person goes from your page to the payment system, he may change his mind several times about purchasing your product, or he may come across another offer.

Using SMM promotion.

Let's summarize. To successfully use social media promotion, you need to do the following things.

Be active on social networks.

This means that you need to recruit friends, create groups, create publications, initiate various discussions, and be visible.

Create your website.

Using a website or blog it is much easier and faster to convey your information to users.

Using social networking buttons on the site.

These buttons can be placed at the beginning of the article, at the end of the article, or in site widgets. It is necessary to organize data exchange between the site and social networks

We must understand that time and effort work on social networks will require no less than working on the site, or even more. But these actions pay off, since the popularity of your services and products will greatly increase, which means sales will go much better.

I wish you all success, health and good mood.

Today we will answer the question of what SMM is and how it works. The abbreviation SMM stands for Social Media Marketing, which in turn translates as Social Media Marketing.

In essence, SMM is everything that is in one way or another connected with promotion and promotion on social networks. The main platforms for promotion are usually Instagram, VKontakte, Facebook and Odnoklassniki.

Why is this relevant? There are more than 65 million users of various social networks in Russia. According to surveys conducted by Statista, Russians use YouTube most actively, VKontakte comes second, and Odnoklassniki comes third. Facebook and Instagram are slightly behind.

How does SMM work?

Social media marketing includes many methods of operation. The most popular of them are the creation of groups and accounts on behalf of companies and brands, targeted advertising, working with opinion leaders (bloggers) and content creation.

The main emphasis is on creating useful content that will be shared by subscribers. It is believed that publications on social networks inspire more trust among potential clients.

When SMM appeared in Russia

Many agree that the concept appeared in the early 2000s, when the Internet became widespread. In Russia, this area of marketing began to develop in 2008. First of all, this is due to the rapid growth of VKontakte and the absence of any restrictions, for example, you could invite all your friends to the group at one time.

But as a separate direction, which began to receive attention, SMM began to appear in the early 10s, and somewhere starting from 2012-13 it acquired cutting and certain canons.

Business promotion using SMM

To understand whether you need SMM, answer the question Why do you need promotion on social networks? If you don’t have a clear understanding of what tasks you can solve and what goals you can achieve, then with a high degree of probability you will not achieve the desired result. There is no point in starting social networks just for the sake of it.

Typically SMM is used to solve the following problems:

talk about your products and services;
collecting feedback, working with negativity;
organizing traffic flow to the site;
increasing brand awareness;
and much more.

Make your list of tasks, and then decide whether you need SMM.

Agencies and SMM specialists

With the advent of a new field in marketing, people have appeared who are specialists in it. They help businesses manage social networks and attract new customers.

Also, entire agencies have appeared that specialize in social media marketing.

Pros and cons of SMM

Pros:

Ability to communicate directly with the client. If the client has objections, you can close them in private messages or in comments.
Huge audience - by going to social networks you get access to an audience of millions.
Minimal start-up costs - registration and creation of a group on any social network is free.
Targeting - using targeting or special parsing programs, you can easily find your target audience by parameters: age, gender, interests.
Development of functionality - many updates appear every year: payment systems within the network, the ability to place goods, publish articles, etc.

Minuses:

The result requires constant work: daily posting, content creation, and so on.
There is no 100% guarantee of results - no serious specialist will guarantee you will achieve a certain result.
High competition - standing out from competitors is becoming more difficult as more and more companies create accounts and launch advertising.
Increase in cost - as a consequence of the previous point, the cost increases. The more players there are on the site, the more you have to spend fighting for the client.

Today we will talk about one of the most important areas. After reading this publication, you will find out what it is SMM marketing what they do SMM managers, how to promote a website or business on social networks yourself and a lot of other useful information on this issue.

What is SMM?

The abbreviation SMM stands for Social Media Marketing, that is, marketing on social networks. In Russian, a similar abbreviation SMM is often used to denote this concept.

SMM (SMM) is the process of promoting a business, website, brand, product or service through popular social networking platforms.

The main principle of SMM promotion is to create some kind of content that will be distributed through social networks in order to attract the attention of their users to something.

Now SMM marketing is actively used in a wide variety of businesses (from large transnational corporations to small home services performed by freelancers), it is also one of the important areas in any subject. For example, the media, information sites, and bloggers are actively involved in SMM promotion.

Why is SMM promotion on social networks important for any business? It's simple: social networks are the best place for the target audience to gather. The main task of SMM marketing is to highlight your target audience among the huge mass of users and turn them into real buyers of your product/service and/or visitors to your online resource.

SMM promotion on social networks is now very popular, so there are many companies and individual SMM specialists who offer their services in this direction. Large companies always have SMM managers on staff; sometimes even entire departments are created to promote business on social networks. You can turn to such specialists, or you can do SMM promotion yourself, using various methods, which I will describe below.

SMM promotion methods.

First of all, it must be said that there are 2 SMM promotion strategies:

Open strategy– a certain brand, product, service, or Internet resource is openly promoted on social networks on behalf of official representatives of the company.
Hidden Strategy– unobtrusive, hidden PR occurs; the names of a brand, product, service, or Internet resource are mentioned as if by chance, not on behalf of official representatives of the company.

It cannot be said that some strategy is better and some is worse - it all depends on the specific situation, on what brand/product/service/site SMM promotion is used for. However, we can say for sure that the hidden strategy is more complex and requires a very competent and professional approach. Because if users notice hidden PR, it will be more like anti-advertising.

Let's consider the main methods of SMM promotion that are successfully used today.

Method 1. Creation and promotion of official communities/pages on social networks. Perhaps this is the most important thing where SMM promotion generally begins. Communities/publics/official pages of a brand or website are created in social networks, to which subscribers will be attracted in the future, and in which the brand/product/service/site will be directly and actively advertised.

In the future, many methods of SMM promotion come down to attracting subscribers to these communities, from where they will go to the company’s main website or order goods/services directly in the communities.

Simply creating a community or page on a social network is not enough - it will be empty and no one will subscribe to it. In the future, you need to work on this page every day, promote it, attracting more and more new subscribers. To do this, high-quality thematic content is posted on the page, ideally unique, but even if not, then at least high-quality.

Content dedicated directly to the brand/product/site can be alternated with content on a similar topic that will be positively received by subscribers (for example, in the public page of a pizzeria you can post various humorous pictures and videos related to pizza).

You can attract subscribers to your pages in different ways:

Targeted advertising on the social network itself.
Advertising on other pages, in communities with the required target audience.
Placement of widgets and links to social networks on the main website.
Carrying out promotions, competitions, sweepstakes.
Providing discounts to subscribers.
Using hashtags, etc.

Hello! In this article we will talk about such a promotion tool as promotion on social networks or SMM promotion.

Today you will learn:

What is SMM;
What tools exist;
How to implement SMM marketing.

What is SMM promotion

Many entrepreneurs skeptically wave their hands when they hear the phrase “promotion using social networks” or SMM. Each of them is sure that social networks are not capable of bringing customers, since they are not aimed at sales, but at entertainment. They are right, but only half. Social networks can attract customers and increase sales.

Sell;
Inform;
Teach;
Entertain.

Selecting tools for promoting a page on a social network

White promotion tools on social networks - all officially approved tools for promoting groups and pages on social networks. Each social network is represented by its own promotion tools.

But the most common ones include the following:

Targeted advertising– small advertisements in various areas of the resource page, as a rule, they consist of an image and a caption to it. Such advertising is displayed only to a specific target audience, the parameters of which can be selected in the settings of this type of advertising on the social network. Almost all social networks offer targeted advertising. The average cost for a month of placing such advertising is 5-10 thousand rubles, payment is made both for impressions and for clicks (your choice).

Advertising in other communities and social network pages. Almost every social network has a community platform where an advertiser can place advertisements for their group. Each community sets its own price for advertising, but on average, a one-time placement will cost you from 100 to 500 rubles.
Competitions– an excellent tool for promoting your company’s group. Organize a contest in which a lucky random person who reposts the post will receive a free gift from you, and users themselves will spread information about your company on the social network.
SEO—group optimization. Yes, yes, pages on social networks also need to be optimized for results both in search engines and in the results of the social network itself. But in the case of a group, we need to optimize the following elements: the name of the group - affects the results on the social network and in the search engine; group description – affects the search engine placement; URL – affects the location in the search engine.
Communication with users. The most time-consuming and useful method. It allows you to better understand the consumer and gain his trust.

Gray tools – tools for promoting groups and pages, the use of which is prohibited by the rules of social networks.

These include:

Cheat subscribers. Not endorsed by any social network. It allows you to rise in search results on a social network, but there is a high probability that the social network will “see through” you and block your page. The average cost for 1000 bots ranges from 100 to 1000 rubles.
Spam is also prohibited by the rules of social networks. However, it can bring positive results. To do this, you just need to send advertising messages only to those who may be interested in your offer.
Massfollowing – following someone on a social network in the hope that they will follow you back.

Black tools – those promotion tools that are prohibited not only by the social network, but also by Russian legislation. This is hacking pages and then sending spam.

Content Creation

The main thing here is not to forget who your consumer is and that your ultimate goal is to sell the product.

This means that you must adhere to the following rules:

Create content that the user would want to post on their page. Your content should revolve around the product, brand or company and at the same time interest the target consumer. Everyone knows that a person “reposts” a post when it reminds him of some situation from his life or himself, take advantage of this fact. This is what the Coffee House cafe chain did, which posted pictures with a funny owl and the captions “Bright morning”, “Sometimes coffee is the only reason why I still have friends and work.”
Brand graphic content and videos. Brand your images and videos, otherwise you won't be recognized.
Teach. Show users how else they can use your product; don’t be afraid to come up with something unusual.
Open the comments and let users discuss you.
Create a plan for posting new posts. You need to consider when during the day your target consumers typically visit social media. But in any case, the publication of new entries must be done at least twice a day.

Hello, my dear readers! Rimma Belyakina is with you. On the pages of the blog site we talk about remote work and the opportunities it provides. Internet technologies are no longer even the future, they are the confident present.

More prudent and enterprising businessmen began to think about introducing business into the Internet space and attracting consumers to their goods or services on social networks.

Are you thinking about this too? Looking for ways to sell your product? Then you definitely need to know what SMM is and how it works. This is what we will look at in more detail in this article. We will also talk about what problems can be solved using SMM, its advantages and how to learn SMM promotion.

A lot has been written about the role of social networks in our lives. And if we put everything together, we would probably get a pretty big ledger, some kind of treatise on how 70-80% of all humanity spend their second, parallel to the real, virtual life in them.

And if we associate social networks with life, albeit virtual, we mean, if not all, then many important aspects of this very life: hobbies and entertainment, learning and work, shopping and sales. That is, everything that we previously had only in real life has now smoothly migrated to the virtual one.

SMM: deciphering the abbreviation and analyzing the essence

What does SMM mean? It is also called social marketing or online marketing. This concept came into use from the English language (“Social Media Marketing” literally means “marketing on social networks”) and is the process of attracting interest to any Internet resource through social platforms.

In other words, this is a mechanism for attracting traffic, that is, a flow of visitors (aka potential consumers), to a brand, service or product through social networks.

To put it even simpler: you are a businessman (real or fictitious), want to do business on the Internet, choose a social platform for this, go there with your product, determine your target audience and offer them your product in every possible way.

And if you want to succeed in online entrepreneurship, you definitely need to be present on a social platform, take part in communicating with users of this social network and selecting interesting, useful and constantly changing content on the topic of your product so that interest in it does not disappear. This is the whole “salt”, it is the essence of SMM promotion.

SMM management tasks

It is clear that SMM is not done by itself; there is a person behind this process. He is called differently: SMM specialist, SMM manager, SMM specialist, Internet marketer. The essence does not change, and the tasks are the same in any case:

Determine your target audience and study their interests.
Conduct a niche analysis: on which platform is it better to promote the brand, in what ways and tools.
To achieve an increase in the number of audiences through a set of activities, which includes advertising, promotions, competitions, and sweepstakes.
Work on creating the company’s image: conduct a PR campaign, monitor feedback, eliminate negativity.
Monitor the promotion process: analysis of statistics and dynamics.

I have listed only the main tasks of SMM management, but, as you understand, this is not the entire list, since each company pursues its own interests and sets its own goals.

SMM in action: stages of promotion

SMM promotion is not an easy job, carried out in several stages:

Choosing a site for your target audience. Why might this be important? Because there are quite a lot of social networks now, and each has its own contingent. Accordingly, their interests are different.
Placement of a communication platform. Having decided on a social network, it is important to think about where the audience will gather for communication. What could it be? A specially created group, or community, or public, or your account. The main thing is not this, but that this platform is constantly working, giving the audience “bread and circuses”, i.e. the content it needs. And this is the next stage.
Content creation and posting. It should not only be interesting and useful, but also viral, that is, one that is liked and shared. To quickly promote your public, you need to invest money and run advertising.
Making a profit or monetizing the project. The most difficult and ambiguous stage, because the main goal of the SMM manager is to ensure that the bulk of subscribers are transferred to the customer’s website and become consumers. Here, whoever is lucky. There are various cases of monetization, both successful and exactly the opposite: you can achieve good earnings from a group with a number of subscribers of 3 – 5 thousand, or you can receive “mere pennies” from groups of “hundred thousanders”.

Here, perhaps, it would be useful to recall the development of the right strategy and tactics for the successful implementation of the project. And also that in every business, in addition to the plan, you need your own mechanisms and tools.

SMM tools

This paragraph of the article will be the shortest, because I have already written about Internet marketing tools and do not want to repeat myself. You can read about this in my previous article about. By the way, there you can watch a video with a detailed analysis of all SMM tools and find out how it all works.

I also advise you to refer to another of my earlier articles “”, where you can glean a lot of useful information and even life hacks on this topic. Don't be lazy to do this. After all, your success will depend on how effectively you use SMM tools.

Pros and cons of SMM

Any industry has its pros and cons, and before starting any business, you need to weigh the pros and cons. Let's now look at what priorities social marketing gives and whether it is worth doing it at all.

So, here are the benefits that social marketing gurus highlight:

Demand. The demand for the services of SMM specialists is steadily growing.
Freelance work. Having understood IT technologies and mastered SMM mechanisms, you will be able not to “steam” in the office. Many people prefer to work from home.
Creative path. An opportunity to show all your hidden talents.
A huge audience of potential clients: after all, social networks have millions of users.
Minimum costs at the start and high payback after promotion.
Solid reward for quality promotion services. The minimum cost of one SMM project is from 30,000 rubles.

What about the downsides? I would prefer to call them difficulties that will have to be encountered in the course of work. And first of all this:

Selection of content that favorably illustrates the promoted product. It requires a rich imagination, which is inherent in few people, and a considerable amount of time to find the right material and design it.
Working with advertising. Most likely, it won’t be possible without investments. You will have to spend money on advertising the product, and you will still need to learn how to do it.
Competition. Business is firmly moving to the Internet. This is where competition comes in.

How to become an SMM specialist?

Since the specialty in question would most correctly be characterized not as narrowly focused, but rather as broad-profile, a lot of knowledge and skills that an SMM specialist must have are required.

What knowledge and skills should an SMM specialist have?

It is clear that he must know the basics of marketing first, but also:

understand information technology,
know media automation tools and be able to use them,
know the features of community management,
have analytical skills,
understand and be able to use targeted and other types of advertising,
have communication skills,
be able to establish contacts and interest,
be creative: be able to create exciting viral content,
be able to develop and put into practice strategies to attract audiences from social networks to the customer’s website.

Self-organization and self-discipline are important qualities. If a specialist needs a kick from his boss, then he is a bad specialist. However, excessive initiative is also unnecessary. As you know, it can be “punishable.” Here it is important to “find a middle ground” so as not to “burn out.”

Where can you learn this?

Social marketing can be learned in specialized online schools or courses, of which there are plenty on the Internet. In a separate article, we have compiled for you a selection and review of the best SMM courses.

Of these, we can highlight the TOP 3 best:

Course from the ConvertMonster project.
Three-month course “SMM Manager” from the online university Netology.
“SMM Manager” course from the Geekbrains portal and the Mail.ru company.

Apparently, there are options, there are many of them, because progress does not stand still. Those who want to study science can only “roll up their sleeves” and get down to business. Well, when you “grind your teeth on this granite,” you will, in the same way and without difficulty, find something you like in the online space, since this business is modern, relevant, and profitable.

Let's sum it up

So, we looked at what SMM is. I tried to present the material as simply as possible. I hope it was clear.

Summarizing all of the above, we can draw a simple conclusion: SMM is in trend today. This is a difficult but effective way to manage your turnover and relationships online. This is a varied and promising job that will suit energetic, pragmatic, people who keep up with the times.

In the next article we will look at the profession of an SMM manager in more detail. Stay tuned.

I would like to believe and know that the article was useful and helped in some way. One way or another, I look forward to your feedback, comments, and suggestions. Let's discuss. For now - bye. And see you again.