SMM and SMO. Make friends and then sell

Background: we do online gift shop. About him some other time. Development from scratch of a similar resource and analysis of the market segment is a difficult and long task, even for experienced people.

In order not to waste time, we decided in parallel to develop the direction of social networks. The main objectives of this decision were:

• Increased knowledge / improvement of opinion about the store
• Forming a loyal audience
• Announcement of promotions, contests (using social networks as a means of creating “moving”)
• Involvement in the discussion of goods (we realized that social networks are the only way to get a true opinion about your product and store first hand)
• Attracting customers to the store website

The idea is simple - gifts are needed by everyone and constantly, so this topic will always be relevant.

I want to share an intermediate result in 2.5 months of work of our VKontakte group .

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Why VKontakte?

We chose a social network to create a community according to the following characteristics:

• general characteristics of the audience
• the presence of developed communities in your niche
• comparison of the social network audience with the one that is a consumer of your products
• share of social network in relation to the rest in RuNet (controversial issue with long-term goals)

There is a very good post from noxx on this topic, so we will not compare audiences here for short.

We determined the goals, it is time to define target actions and digital indicators of the group’s performance.

Targeted action

• Go to the store website
• Discussion of goods and leaving feedback on the store
• Participation in contests and group events
• Writing posts with a request to help with the choice of a gift
• Filling the group (wall, video, photo, etc.) with participants

What we strive for in six months (June 2011)

• Group attendance - we need 500-600 people per day
• The number of active participants in the group - at least 10-15% through
• The number of clicks to the site from the group - at least 100 people per day

Stimulation of interest in store goods

What is planned to change in the group for its unobtrusive branding after the launch of the store:

• indication of the address of the store and the logo on the avatar of the group (small size, somewhere in the corner)
• with a large number of discussions topics with a description of your products should always be in the top three
• link to the store site in the group description
• publication of store news (also without overdoing) on ​​the group wall
• creation of separate video and photo galleries of goods store
• etc.

Registration and filling group

In order for the group to "live", our employees spend at least 3 hours a day working with materials:

• avatars change for the holidays
• corrected the rules of conduct in the group
• updated graphic menu
• topics for asking for help are monitored constantly, for 12 hours we help a person to make a choice
• photo albums, video, wall - constantly reflect relevant information about the community

Attracting participants

After analyzing the groups in which a bunch of participants (up to 500,000!) And one or two lonely topics with several messages, we finally made sure that spam is not for us.

It does not work for people, and we work. By the way, after a while, VKontakte finally killed this trend, and now you can only invite people from among friends. But we are not sad.

In order for the group not to be empty and we did not communicate with ourselves, we asked all our friends to join the group and discuss several topics. Communication sluggish, but went. Personal acquaintances played a decisive role in many ways when our friends and friends of friends began to apply to our group for help with choosing gifts.

The ice has broken.

Additional methods we used

• setting descriptions for searching VKontakte
• sane groups of friends and constant communication with their moderators
• cossacks in thematic groups. Not trivial spam, but a search for topics in which our answers and group can be useful to people.

Involving participants in discussions and actions

As mentioned above, we help people with tips on choosing gifts in a relatively short time. The one who asks for help, describes for whom (gender, age, who is for the applicant) and for what reason he wants to make a gift.

In order to teach our visitors to communicate in a group and browse through new topics and posts, we decided to hold contests - every month, a certain date, so that our participants know, having entered at least once a month on a certain day, they can participate in the competition or find out the results of the previous one.

At the same time, we understand that the guarantee of a good competition is simple rules. The simpler - the more participants. Prizes - from money and unusual gifts flash drives to the publication of photos of the winner on the avatar of the group. There are a lot of ideas until the second contest starts - “a romantic couple”.

Statistics

We figured that band members are unlikely to come to us more than once a week.

Statistics showed us that we were not mistaken. In addition, we got some interesting data.

Peaks of attendance were on Tuesdays and Sundays, so we decided that information about the most important events should be published on the night before the holidays, as well as on Mondays and Saturdays.


Audience activity (participation in discussions and filling the group) after 2 months of work has already been at 5%


The traffic that comes to the sites of the nanze, will mainly consist of women. However, it is unlikely that the female VKontakte audience will buy something very expensive in the online store. On the other hand, they can look for gifts for men and it also makes sense to present them in the store.


It can be seen that mostly people are 18-24 years old. Those. visitors who are unlikely to buy expensive gifts. Moreover, over time, the ratio varies little. It can be assumed that this will continue to remain at the same level.


Mostly - large cities, where even students can easily afford to buy a rather expensive thing. Therefore, age should not confuse us.


Feedback


Percentage of new and exiting members

Reports

In order to understand the activity of the audience, calculate the seasonality and understand exactly what our actions lead to improved results, every month we compile reports that contain:

• a list of completed works with external sources (where, on what day and what time was done to compare data on the influx of visitors depending on what was done)
• performed work with the materials of the group, in the same way as above, in order to understand what determines the activity of visitors
• separate statistics about competitions
• number of visitors and pages viewed
• gender and age of participants
• Feedback (I like, comments, tell friends, wall) - this is the activity of the participants
• interest (share of new participants and percentage left the group)

Conclusions and results

Statistics for several months clearly showed that we had chosen the site correctly.

Spam VKontakte - does not work.

Our attention to the audience, which is not aimed primarily at selling something, allows us to achieve one of the main goals - to obtain truthful and detailed views of the loyal audience about the work of the store and the goods sold firsthand.

The current percentage of transitions to the site of the future store (we did not advertise and did not shout about our still poor site stub in each branch) - about 1%.

Increasing the number of group members for good development and growth of attendance should be at least 2000 new people per month.

So far, our group has 5,370 participants after 2.5 months of active work.

Perhaps something forgot. I will be glad to questions.