Best social media platforms for sales

With huge and confident steps, a business goes online: today almost any enterprise has its own website. Many companies promote on the Internet using SEO or contextual advertising, but far from everyone tries to promote a business on social networks, and even fewer business representatives do it wisely. So how to do it right, and how to avoid common mistakes?

Set goals and develop strategies

Promotion in SMM requires a well-thought-out strategy, an in-depth analysis of statistics and results, clear goals and testing of various approaches. But first things first.

So, you have a business that you want to develop and popularize on the Internet. First, decide what goals you want to achieve through social networks. They can be different:

• increase customer loyalty to the brand;
• announce new products, events;
• attract additional traffic to the site;
• become “closer” to your customers – study their needs and establish communications;
• get an additional sales channel.

You should not create a public or group just because competitors already have it. Most likely, in this case, nothing will work out for you, and the community will quickly become “dead”, which will spoil the reputation of the company.

Armed with goals, start choosing social networks for your business. Think about where your target audience “lives”. Let it be one or two channels, but with effective development and tangible returns.

Determine what and for whom you are writing

You need to determine what content your target audience really needs. This may be articles by experts, advice on choosing products, humorous comics. It is important that the content is unique, interesting and thematic. Publications must be viral, that is, lively and emotional, so that subscribers want to share them.

It’s easier, of course, to duplicate posts in all networks, but this is not the most effective way. Why? Most often, Internet users are registered at once in several social networks. If you offer the same content, then the user will not have to follow you everywhere, they will just choose one site convenient for themselves, and on the rest you will “lose” them. In addition, users come to different social networks for various reasons: on Instagram, mainly for beautiful pictures, on Facebook for news and serious materials. Given this, it is necessary to prepare different content for different social networks.

In addition, to get more effect from publications, it is important to optimize the content – add bright, attention-grabbing pictures to posts, use hashtags and geotags, place subscription and sharing widgets on the site.

You need to work on development constantly

In order for your groups and pages to actively “live”, and not hang dead weight, fresh posts must be added daily (once a day – at least) and regularly. The number of posts per day/week is determined by the specifics of the business, and the publication time needs to be established, guided by the statistics of the group. You need to track at what time most subscribers are online.

Moreover, it is important to offer users different types of materials – not only text, but also photo/video, especially now there are many applications for creating visual content.

Several social networks with different content, at least 1 post per day – this is a fairly large amount of work, which will help you to postpone posting programs.

There are other ways to promote on social networks:

• targeted advertising
• community advertising
• application branding

Happiness is not in subscribers

Always remember that promotion performance is not measured by the number of community members. There can be two, three or ten thousand, and the conversion from this is insignificant. And all because the audience is not targeted, they’re not interested in what you publish. Participants must be involved in the work of the group: they must like, comment on posts, share information.

And in order to establish such a dialogue with users, it is important for the brand to be involved in the communication itself – to answer all comments, participate in discussions in other groups and track comments from potential customers, provoke subscribers (organize contests and polls, ask users questions in their posts, express controversial points of view).

Price issues

The cost of promotion on social networks depends on what results you want to receive and for how long. The main thing to understand is that not everyone can engage in SMM promotion. This requires special knowledge, skills and experience.

Decide to promote your business on social networks yourself or put this matter in the hands of professionals – it’s up to you. Most importantly, do not forget to periodically analyze the results, review and adjust the strategy. To do this, you can view the statistics in the social networks themselves, pay attention to which posts get the most shares, likes and comments, track the number of clicks to the site from your groups. All this will allow you to better know your audience, adjust to it and not lose in the future.

Facebook Promotion: Page, Group or Public

There are three ways you can promote on Facebook: promote your personal page, group, or business page. For promoting a company the third option is most suitable.

There are several reasons for this:

1. In your personal profile you will not be able to use the name of the company or store – only the name and surname. And if it is possible to “trick the system” by specifying a brand name instead, then Facebook can detect a violation at any time.
2. The groups are made for communication and not on sales and branding. The logo in the group can only be placed on the avatar, geotags and contact information cannot be set, targeting in the group is impossible.
3. It is difficult to promote a group on Facebook, because it has no statistics and it is impossible to track the effectiveness.
4. Posts in the group have low coverage and are poorly displayed in the stream.

Business Promotion on Facebook: Step-by-Step Instructions

There are so many Facebook promotion methods that no courses can describe them all. We selected ten mandatory and placed them in order of priority. The result was a take-and-do instruction.

Create an avatar and cover art

The recommended minimum avatar size is 170X170 pixels. But it’s better to take a higher resolution picture so that it displays well on large monitors.

The same rule applies to the cover – we recommend making it 1702X630 in size. A small cover does not look good on a high-resolution monitor; there is a lot of black field around it.

Set pattern

A business page is also suitable for promoting a company on Facebook because you can choose a display template.

Facebook offers special templates for services, shops, non-profit organizations, political pages and so on. The selected template can be edited to fit your needs. For the store, you can add products, for the services page, set the target action by the button.

Fill in the information on the page

A typical mistake in promoting groups and pages on Facebook is to fill out not all information about the company. Someone doesn’t have a list of services with prices, someone doesn’t add reviews and photos, and someone even indicates the field of activity indistinctly. Here the rule applies, as with the site – the user from the first seconds should understand where he got and what awaits him on the page.

You can enter company information in the Information section of the side menu.

Add some real photos: goods, employees, office. They immediately catch your eye and “catch” better than stock photos.

Post good content regularly

This is easier said than done, but if useful and interesting posts appear on your page regularly (at least 2-3 times a week), people will subscribe to you themselves, even without paid promotion.

Content may be marketing or informational. For many years, the rule of 70 by 30 has been working in SMM and promoting on Facebook, that is, you post 70% of information content and only 30% of sales.

Mention users in posts

All friends of the mentioned user will see the post in their feed, and this will significantly increase the reach.

Leave the link to the page wherever possible

This is not about spam, but about a link to your other pages. This gives a good effect for promotion on Facebook.

Invite people to subscribe

In the worst case, people will ignore it. At best, they will subscribe to you temporarily until you get subscribers (usually friends do this), or they will read you constantly.

Negotiate a mutual PR

Promotion through Facebook, as well as promotion in general, is impossible without partnerships.

Select community-related communities whose audience would be interested in your community. Write to community admins with a proposal for mutual PR. This method is suitable if you have already scored a certain number of subscribers – no one wants to PR in an empty community.

Raise publications

The system offers you it by default. Click on the “Raise Publication” button and select the audience for targeting – those to whom the post will be shown. Promoting a Facebook business through targeted advertising is a separate and very big topic.

Comment on other people’s posts

Leaving interesting comments and encouraging readers to go to your profile and to your page is another working way to promote your brand on Facebook. Of course, it is time consuming, but its use will help you kill two birds with one stone:

– attract attention to yourself;
– keep abreast of your topic or related topics by regularly studying discussions.

Select for yourself a list of pages, groups or just interesting people, among whose subscribers there are many of your potential customers. Every day, review their comments and comment. There are two rules:

1. Write comments only if you really have something to say;

2. “Burn” – do everything so that your comment is useful, memorable and inspiring to continue the discussion.

Ways to promote on Instagram

Regular posting, interesting content

Remember that account design and cool content is the foundation without which Instagram is nowhere to go.

Hashtags

They help to find posts on a specific topic. You can insert a maximum of 30 hashtags in the post and several in the Stories, but in fact you do not need so much.

How to find hashtags to help you advance:

• Pick hashtags based on your keywords and frequency.
• If you want to break into the top publications on the hashtag, see how many likes the top has. If an average of 2 thousand, and you have a maximum of 200 – this is not your option.
• See hashtag spam. If there are many off-topic posts among publications, users are unlikely to search on them.
• Do not use the same hashtags, test different ones and select the ones that are suitable for the topic.

Geo tags

A good way for a local business – a store, cafe, service, and so on. If you click on this, then you can see all the posts with this tag. At the top of the page with the search results is a map, in the mobile version it is clickable and when clicked it throws it to Google Maps.

Involvement

In each post, encourage comments: ask questions, ask to share experiences, tips, come up with a joke, and so on. You can even play in the cities if nothing comes to mind.

Affiliate posts

Choose accounts where your target audience is. Then it will be the impression that you are simply advising an interesting account, and not doing mutual PR.

Paid Post Promotion

The point is to show the post not only to your subscribers, but to the right audience outside of your account.

Instagram ads can run in feeds or stories. What an advertising post might look like:

• one photo or video;
• carousel with several photos or videos;
• slide show up to 10 frames.

Ads can be run on Instagram from a business account or through Facebook AdsManager.

To start advertising from Instagram, click the “Promotions” button, it is located on the main page of your account. The social network will offer you to choose the post you want to promote. Next you need to choose:

• Destination, that is, where the button on the post will lead. The options are on your profile, website or in Direct.
• Audience – you can either automatically select an audience similar to existing subscribers, or set up again. Setting criteria – geography, interests, gender and age.
• Advertising duration and daily budget. Instagram will tell you how many people will be able to reach with these settings.

To run ads through Facebook Ads Manager, go to the Facebook page to which your Instagram business account is linked. To enter the Ads Manager, in the control panel at the top, click “Create” and select “Advertising”

Game Activities

These are contests, quizzes and any other game action for which you will give a prize to the winner.

Here are some basic mechanics for promoting your Instagram business through a contest:

• Random selection among post comments. Ask in the comments to answer the question, mark friends there and even just put the serial number.
• Repost a post in Stories. Ask subscribers to post your post to Stories with a reference to your account. In order not to lose the participants, either immediately put all the reposts on the tablet, or ask to fix the competitive Stories up to date.
• Post with a proprietary hashtag.

Describe in detail all the conditions of the contest in a post so that no one has a complaint:

• time spending;
• the terms of participation;
• prizes, delivery dates and how to pick them up;
• the mechanics of choosing a winner.

Attention! Choose the prizes your target audience wants. Make the conditions simple so that people participate, but not elementary, so that freeloaders do not rush.

Blogger Ads

An effective way to promote on Instagram is to find a blogger with the right audience and buy a post from them.

Saving on advertising from such bloggers is optional. More effective and much cheaper will be advertising with microinfluencers with an audience of up to 10 thousand people. The microinfluencer maintains live contact with their small audience, and besides, they may be a well-known person in the city, which is good for a local business.

What to look for when choosing a blogger:

• Does your account have a target audience?
• The quality and subject matter of the content – whether the post about you will look organic.
• Are there publications of competitors – you can’t advertise “both yours and ours”, it’s duplicitous and will cause negative feedback from subscribers.
• Engagement – how many views Stories gain, how many likes and comments posts get regarding the number of subscribers. Compare metrics with similar accounts. If the difference is big – most likely, the blogger has subscribers.
• Statistics for the last week – ask for a screenshot.

Let the blogger prepare the post himself – he knows what kind of presentation his audience needs. A good option is to give the contractor a detailed statement of work and write down all the points that you want to see in the text. Let the blogger himself make the visual, then the photos or videos will be in the style of the account.