Those who seek to sell their goods through these modern and dynamic marketplaces must own several simple rules not only to attract, but also to retain customers. Here is some of them.
- The name of the group should make it easy to search for the query. It should be concise and contain the name of the product or service that is offered in the group. The logo or avatar that the user sees on the first visit also matters.
- To avoid leakage of participants, it is necessary to constantly keep their attention with new posts: articles, proposals, polls, etc. Up to three different messages daily are considered optimal.
- The purpose of visiting social networks is communication. Therefore, it is necessary to involve participants in communication as much as possible. For this, interesting target audience topics for discussion, controversial articles that cause a great response, active and interested responses to comments.
- If possible, it is worth organizing and encouraging the exchange useful information, links, coupons, promo codes and more.
- Holding promotions and contests will not only attract the attention of new participants and keep the interest of old ones, but will also provide a basis for new content.
- In a competitive environment, each group must have its own “zest”, be unique in some way in order to ensure the influx and support of participants.
- Spam is the problem of our time. No one likes a constant stream of unnecessary information. The task of group administrators is to protect members from this.
- It is necessary to provide as many mentions of the group as possible on other pages of the social network, as well as in blogs, on thematic sites, etc. The simplest thing is to tell your friends not only about the group, but also about the news in it. You should also exchange links with groups with related topics. There are options for commercial groups paid promotion on the pages of groups with the target audience.
Filling the group in social networks: Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, Twitter and Facebook
After the group is created, it needs to be filled with interesting and relevant information, and then specialized services will come to your aid. You just need to connect your group to the service, select a topic (one or more) and the frequency of publication (from every 15 minutes to 1 time per day) - and that's it.
Your group will be filled with interesting thematic articles, photos on the topic, etc.
The cost of filling social groups
The cost of filling the group is only 99 kopecks per post
Benefits of working with the system:
- Simplicity. Connection and configuration takes no more than 5 minutes.
- Reliability. Our mechanisms have been tested by hundreds of users.
- Safety. The publication goes through the official application.
- Economy. The cost of the post is only 99 kopecks.
- Quality. Used proven and thematic posts.
- Versatility. Groups, publics, pages and accounts are supported.
- Continuity. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
- Uniqueness. Processing images of posts, watermarking.
In order to start filling groups, you need to register using the link, attach an account in social networks and replenish the internal account.
AT in social networks there are the same people who come to the shops. Social networks have a huge audience, and this audience is your potential customers. Moreover, many people, especially young people, often do not use any other sites on the Internet other than social networks. But you need to understand that people come to social networks for communication and entertainment, and keep this in mind when building a strategy for interacting with the audience.
As it is now fashionable to say, the company must be customer-oriented. This means, among other things, that communication should be in a language familiar to your audience. Choose the appropriate communication option accordingly. Let's use and interesting information. Attract with something new. There is a good rule for social networks - information does not have to be unique, but it must be from sources that are inaccessible (unusual) to your subscribers. For example, if you work in the fashion segment and for a Russian-speaking audience, then you should not reprint materials from Russian glossy magazines.In my opinion, everyone should be added as a friend or invited to groups - the larger the community, the better. In this case, quantity always develops into quality.
Approximate step-by-step instruction launching activities in social networks:
10. Ask your employees, friends, existing clients and partners. Ask current clients and partners to leave positive feedback/impressions of cooperation. Neutral feedback is also helpful, as for many customers a "normal" attitude is also a positive thing. Even negative feedback will not hurt - all people understand that problems happen from time to time, it is important what kind of reaction followed from the side of the company's employees and how quickly the problem was solved.
A few more features of social networks for business:
- social networks are not a store, it is not always possible to sell directly;
- rapid dissemination of information, especially negative;
- "dead" groups and communities will scare away customers rather than attract;
- the intensity of publications differs in different social networks: Facebook - from 1-2 posts per week to 1 per day; classmates - 1-2 per day; Vkontakte from 2 per day to 10; instagram - from 2-3 per week to 1-2 per day; twitter - 2-3 per day;
- you should also choose the time of publication. The time will depend on the portrait of your target audience and on each specific social network. For most cases, the most actual time 8-11 and 17-21 hours.
To begin with, let's make a reservation: for simplicity, we will write about "maintaining a VKontakte group", but we are talking about the "entity" that is managed by some company in social networks. it Group VKontakte or Odnoklassniki, page on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram it's easy account, in youtube it channel.
- group management
- attracting an audience (in this article we are talking only about leading a group, about attracting it is described in another article -)
What is “maintaining a VKontakte group” and in other social networks?
Maintaining a VKontakte group is what you post to the group about, how often, on what topics and in what format. That is it the set of measures that you take to fill the group with content, as well as how you respond to questions or comments in the group.
Groups that are well run are easier to promote - that is, to gain an audience for them.
How to lead a group on VKontakte (or other social networks)?
This, of course, depends on the goals. Maintaining a group in VKontakte or a page on social networks is just a small piece of your company's marketing strategy, which should describe what you generally want to achieve from social networks, and, accordingly, exactly how you will achieve this.
Goals, moreover, change over time, if at the first stage it is more important for you to gain an audience, then sooner or later the question will arise that it would be good for the audience to sell something.
Therefore, the methods of maintaining a group or page in social networks change over time, and there is no absolutely correct tactics for maintaining social networks for all occasions.
However, we will outline to you how we see the correct management of groups in social networks, which is suitable in most cases. We proceed from the fact that the goals of conducting in a group consist of three components - audience growth, activity in the group, and sales - either in the form of traffic to the site, followed by conversion, or in the form of offline sales.
So the first postulate:
The group should regularly post interesting and relevant content.
Let's clarify a couple of points. Why even post content in a group? Then, that one of your goals for sure is audience growth, and the audience is not in a hurry to join a group where there have been no new posts for the last six months.
How often should you post to a group? The answer often surprises our customers, but it is this:
You need to fast so often that the goals are fulfilled.
It is clear that the group will not grow from posting alone, that is, there will also be advertising. And you need to fast so many times that the goals are fulfilled. If at certain level ads, your goals for growth in the group are met - ok, then everything is fine. If another KPI becomes important for you - traffic from the site - you may need to increase the frequency of posting with links to blog articles or products / services on the site.
Why should content be interesting? For the audience to join the group. Therefore, you need to be very careful about what you want to post. Is it really interesting for your audience that your company took part in some kind of exhibition there? Or that your accountant has a birthday?
Why does content need to be relevant? Because in this case it acts as a kind of filter. Imagine that you are selling, say, some equipment. Of course, you can post cats and owls in your group, and maybe even be able to build an audience. But these people joined your group, among other things, because there is SUCH content - they wanted it. They don’t give a damn about your equipment, and accordingly, such an audience is not needed. It’s better that you gain an audience with great difficulty, talking about your machines, but if people enter there, it means that they are interested in something about them.
Useful information should be interspersed with materials about goods / services
Sometimes the owners of groups / pages post ONLY various useful articles, and do not offer to buy anything at all. Either they are embarrassed to do it, or they do not believe that it will work.
But as we said, most likely sales are your goal.
TO SOMETHING SELL, NEED SELL
That is at least make an attempt. Therefore, from time to time you need to post your proposals to the group. It is important that this does not turn into a continuous stream of advertising, because this will hurt the growth of the group.
Often people imagine that all SMM is posting another information about their product on social networks, and nothing more. This may help those who are looking for such a product right now, but it certainly will not help build an audience. No one wants to read only ads.
Use hashtags
First, use hashtags for your product, service, and city (region) if you are limited by some geography. For example - #tomsk #business cards. Second, use the hashtag of your brand. This will help when people are looking for something you have to offer or your brand.
You can also use separate hashtags for promotions, contests or various activities.
No need to overdo it with them, more than 2-3 hashtags is appropriate only on Instagram, but it is advisable to use them.
You need to post links to the blog on your site
Why? Yes, because if a person reads your entire article from the comfort of his VKontakte feed, then ok, he will read it, say thank you, and continue to scroll through the feed. And if he goes to the site, you have an increased chance to sell something to him, or to achieve another targeted action from him - a subscription to a newsletter, for example.
He can also, after reading the article, go to another article, because you probably have a “similar articles” mechanism implemented. He may be interested in a catalog of goods or a price list for services. Traffic to a site is always better than traffic that just stays in a group.
Keep track of what's happening in the group
If your group reaches some significant size, you will start to post all kinds of spam from those who offer similar products or services. Of course, the group needs to be cleansed of this.
Answer questions in a group
You can often see such a picture - the owner of the group himself does not often look there, and does not even see the questions that he is asked there. It's really scary. After all, this is essentially what everything is done for. No one will ask a question about a product or service they don't care about. If a person asks a question, then he is interested in one way or another in the purchase, then he is a “lead”!
Of course, all questions in the group must be answered. And what do you yourself think about the group where you drop in, and there are unanswered questions for a week? Our article describes how to track comments in a VKontakte group.
Encourage questions in the group
If no one in your group asks any questions, that's bad. This may indicate that the wrong audience has gathered in the group, which needs it. Again, it is difficult for indifferent people to sell something. Someone may be interested, but he is embarrassed to ask - after all, no one here asks!
It's like in a bar - you come to a bar where music is playing and everyone is dancing - and you yourself will dance. Or do you go to a bar where no one is dancing - does it take a lot of courage to go out first and start bobbing?
The same is true in a group. People look at what is "accepted" here. If it is customary to ask questions here, if they are answered, then they will also ask questions.
Sometimes it helps to create a separate “discussion” in your VKontakte group, where you can write your questions directly and post something like “we will be happy to answer your questions”.
And finally, for the initial promotion of activity in the group, you will most likely have to simulate it. You won't get anywhere. If there is no example, people will not follow it. That is - either with the help of your friends, or with the help of activity from the same service like forumok.com - you create a certain stream (not necessarily large) of questions in the feed or in a discussion in your group, and answer them on behalf of the company (community ). This will definitely help the group members to “be bolder” and ask questions on the topic.
We cannot write enough to overstate the importance of this. Activity is very important in a group, because there is only one step from a question to a sale. If there is complete “silence” in the group, it is very difficult to imagine that it will sell something.
We hesitated for a long time whether to use such an idea as unblocking content on the site "in exchange" for social actions - like liking,...
When a social media manager creates content, he thinks about how to share newsbreaks between several networks and whether it is worth doing at all (of course, if this is a good social media manager, a bad one does not think about it at all).
Start from the beginning
Explore the Audience
Only the person who is very loyal to you subscribes to your groups in all social networks: the director, his mother and, possibly, employees. Customers subscribe to one social network that is more familiar to them. Want to subscribe to all your groups? They must be different.
In addition, social media users perceive information differently. This is due both to the characteristics of the audience and to the available functions of networks (for example, you can’t post audio on Facebook, but it’s allowed on VKontakte). To be understood and loved, speak the same language with subscribers.
Speak the same language with subscribers!
Here is the data of several studies, which show that social networks are used by dissimilar audiences.
Distribution of popularity of social networks by age groups (Vera Berezina from IntekMedia, 2016)
Distribution of social network users by place of residence (data from VK Digital Day 2017)
Distribution of users by income level, million people
Highlight key social networks - what your audience uses. Find out how the audience behaves during the day: when it enters the network, when it likes and reposts, when it just browses. If your audience is schoolchildren, then they are unlikely to see a post posted in the morning, when they are still in class.
Then collect all the information - so you will make a portrait of your audience. Perhaps the portrait will turn out different for each network - this is another reason to think about unique content for each network.
Tailor your content
Now that you understand that you need to run networks in different ways, the question arose: how to save time and not write again every time.
Set different posting times - this is important because your subscribers can be from different regions (when it's already lunch in Novosibirsk, it's only morning in Moscow).
Already in 2008, the number of users who regularly use the Internet amounted to almost a quarter of the world's population. Is it an electronic revolution or new information transmission systems simply superimposed on existing traditional schemes, it is difficult to judge, but now it is impossible to deny the influence of the Internet on social processes.
With the advent of social media, we are faced with a new, virtual reality where the personal life of a person is in full view. Someone uses the opportunities that have opened up to form an attractive personality, others - to search for necessary information, others - for entertainment and establishing contacts with other network users. One way or another, like any other social environment, the virtual analogue is no less important tool for the development of communications in the professional sphere.
In the field of education, the possibilities of social networks have also been used not since yesterday. The pioneers of the possibilities of social media in the field of education can be considered teachers-bloggers, who thus created a "warehouse" of useful materials for students, posted in limited access copies teaching aids with the permission of the author, allowing students to use them in preparing for exams.
Modern social networks have more advanced features: not only create individual entries, but also upload video materials, audio recordings, send private messages, and even open virtual platforms for discussing complex topics.
Working at MAXIMUM and applying the tools of social media in practice, we found out that building media communication in virtual classroom, where the teacher is still the leader, has a lot of advantages. Using the familiar interface, the student feels much more confident, and under the guidance of a mentor, he is able to combine entertainment with learning.
We want to show how an ordinary school teacher can use the opportunities of online communication to improve the results of their students and engage in the learning process.
Stage I. Entering the social platform
The most effective option is to create a community in one of the social networks, for example, VKontakte or Facebook. Most social networks allow you to create a "group", that is, a single platform with the ability to add users - students to it.
On the initial stage you need to make sure that all students have the opportunity to join the community. The teacher should explain to the class that, despite the informal nature of the site, participation in this activity is necessary for everyone. We advise you to start using this tool from the 9th grade of school. If the student does not want to “sit” on the social network, then you can agree with him to create a special page from which he will only enter your training group, without wasting time on entertainment on the Internet.
You can come up with a variety of names for the group - starting from “Mathematics Group 9A class of school No. X” and ending with “The Most interesting group in Mathematics If you are teaching multiple classes, we recommend that you create several separate groups for each class, and lead them while you are the teacher of that class. This will emphasize the individuality of these groups and will not allow you to lose personal contact.
It is important to remember that the technology of interaction with students in the framework of social media involves the so-called "edutainment", combining business with pleasure. Informative serious posts in such groups alternate with albeit less useful, but humorous or motivational messages.
If you don't feel confident in creating a whole community, then you can start with group messaging in the same network. You will still be able to send messages and materials to the whole group, but in a less structured way.
Stage II. Communication process
Working in a virtual community is similar to working in a classroom. We still communicate with the group as a whole, ask general and personal questions, discuss problematic topics, and so on. The difference is that here we can chat with any student "tete-a-tete" at any time. In addition, the activity on the personal page of each student is a storehouse of valuable information for any teacher. We can be among the first to learn about Petya's unhappy love (which will certainly affect his attitude to studies in the first period), and, therefore, slightly adjust our approach to Petya's studies.
Stage III. Activity support
It is not enough just to create a community and establish contacts. It is important to maintain it and systematically fill it with content. It could just be a picture with text on it. English language, a table with important dates of the 20th century, a discussion question, the USE schedule, or tips on how to cope with exam stress.
In the lesson, sometimes refer to the material that was posted to the group earlier. After this preparation, you can move on to the next step.
Stage IV. co-authorship
By first showing how to create content in a community, you can give students the opportunity to create entries on their own - in small groups or with a teacher. This process is not much different from preparing a small traditional subject project. The only difference is that such a project is not presented at a predetermined time in the classroom - each student can familiarize himself with the work of others at any time.
The task of the teacher here is to correct the course in time, present a new idea, and reward a job well done. This will be very similar to how students write short notes on various topics.
You should not thoughtlessly start creating a virtual educational platform based on a social network. Before you click the “create a community” button, decide on a set of goals and objectives that you set for yourself. Ask yourself the question: “What will be relevant for my class and my subject?”. Show the class an example of what you ultimately want to see. Be prepared for the fact that at first you will have to spend a lot of extra-curricular time on maintaining a virtual community, but the efforts spent will be rewarded not only by increasing the level of knowledge, but also by establishing a trusting atmosphere in the classroom.
