Socialize it: top 5 obstacles for an advertiser on social networks

Show me an advertiser who is not thinking about social media promotion today. There probably are no more. And this is understandable - all users are there, which means that there is the same place for advertising our products, services, services, brands.

Since the beginning of the year, we have been directing our marketing efforts in this direction, but social networks have not been so simple. Of course, the main thing is interesting content, engagement in communication, creative approach, we do not argue with that. This requires material and mental investment and not everyone can do it. However, the creators of social networks have prepared for advertisers some additional obstacles to the hearts of buyers.
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Today we publish the top 5 problems of social media , which we learned in the process. Maybe this will help you not to step on the same rake.


5th place. Dead Souls
This is the only item in our chart that is not related to the actions of service administrations. Here we are talking about the central element of any social network - its audience. About the audience of "My World".

Who are these people? We can't find them, honestly. The number of users in the communities is quite large - more than 500 thousand in each of the top ten. At the same time, the activity is very specific. To any post, users respond with either a massive “Thank you !!!!!!!!”, “Super!”, “Class !!”, while no one goes to the site specified in the post (and the content is all on the site where they are from we learned that the super is unclear), or the answers are generally inadequate.

Invitations to the group are almost useless - even on Vkontakte full of spam, conversion of invitees to our groups into users = about 6%, conversion in My world = 0. Apparently users are so rare on the site that they don’t see invitations at all.
The application did not do, did not try to promote. Tell us what and how?

4th place. This magic number is 2000
Once, the counter next to the following message on Twitter showed 2000. This did not happen in one day, because we tried to choose our friends by interest, made sure that we were followed in response and did not belong to aggressive mass followers at all. But what other way is there to tell Twitter users about your microblog?

2000 turned out to be a critical threshold. Now we must clearly maintain the proportion of following / followers = 1.1 and no more! You can of course immediately follow everyone who you follow ... Apparently they are supposed to stay with you if your content is really interesting to them. But this is not yet in Russian traditions - so cynically get rid of friends. Therefore, we begin every day with calculations, how many tweeters today we can tell about our blog :)

Paid accounts for a business with advanced capabilities - we are waiting for you.

3rd place. Say no to traditional marketing
It is now fashionable on Habré to scold Vkontakte. And although you absolutely do not want to scold just that, some actions of the administration are unpleasantly surprising. It has already been discussed here that the abolition of bonuses for friends has dramatically slowed down the development of the application market. And from the point of view of any normal marketer, this is understandable. Promotions for gift purchase, bonus and referral programs are recognized marketing tools for attracting new customers. Why did they fall out of favor with Vkontakte? For us, it remains a mystery.

2nd place. Earned - try to spend
Here all the same characters. After our application for Vkontakte ( voice cards VoiceCards ) still earned a couple of hundred votes, we began to think how to use them as much as possible. They wrote a lot about the withdrawal of votes, so this option is not considered.

Advertising applications - the first thing that comes to mind. Tried, tested. The average CPC is 0.21 votes, the conversion to application settings is 25%, the conversion to purchases is 4% - the indicators are generally quite good, but plus advertising does not work. Moreover, with such a low traffic rate is unbearably small. For some reason, the traditional strategy of lowering rates due to narrower marketing (in contextual advertising systems) does not work here. Quite the opposite - trying to improve the effectiveness of your ads and make them more targeted, we get a significant increase in the cost ...

We decided to negotiate with popular groups and recommend our application at these sites. Practice has shown that conversion in installations is much higher here, because users trust the groups in which they are active. But since July, transferring votes earned in the application is prohibited for other users of Vkontakte. This is how ...

And suddenly Vkontakte allowed advertising external links. Hooray! But no ... it is also impossible to transfer votes earned by an application to such announcements.

1 place. Place your bets, gentlemen!
Who is the winner of our small rating? Drum roll ... Yes, yes, they are the favorite "Classmates". Anyone who has ever made a group in Odnoklassniki does not need to explain that this is just pi ... n rather laborious work. But the saddest thing is that you cannot put direct links to external resources in groups. Nowhere. Neither in the description, nor in the comments, nor in the news.

And so, once we saw one of the groups magic icon "premium". With a huge amount of effort (this is a topic for a separate post - “Why is it so difficult to get a price for branded applications and groups in Odnoklassniki?”), We got the cherished knowledge - what gives this icon to the group creator and most importantly how much it costs to get.

So, I quote the official commercial offer: “A commercial group is marked with a premium on the main page of the group and an asterisk in the list of groups. Opportunities: placing a link to the client’s site in the group header, direct addressing to the group, collecting statistics through Google Analytics, placing the Iframe on the group’s page, and the ability to create private photo albums. ”

Well, now guess what number of bills you need to prepare to enjoy all these sweets? In our office, no one guessed. The cost of this service is neither more nor less than 1.5 million rubles without VAT. Save money, gentlemen!

For those who are not very well oriented in prices in the market of Internet advertising in Russia, here is an exemplary comparison. For 1.5 million rubles you can: 16,000,000 12,500,000 times show ads on the Yandex home page; buy 17,647 transitions from Vkontakte (I am convinced again and again how high their CPC is) or 10 years to run a corporate blog on Habré at the steepest fare. In short, a little expensive.

And what is the result?
It is said that in times of harsh censorship great works are born. Probably, such a policy of the administration of social networks will also lead to the fact that the methods of promotion will become more sophisticated, the tools are more aggressive, and the budgets are definitely larger. But the question is - will users like these methods?

PS And we decided to spend the August budget for promotion in social networks on Facebook :)