Socialize it: Top 5 Barriers for an Advertiser on Social Media

Show me an advertiser who doesn't think about social media promotion today. There probably aren't any left. And this is understandable - all users are there, which means that the same place is there 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 proved to be not so simple. Of course, the main thing is interesting content, involvement in communication, a creative approach, we cannot argue with that. This requires material and mental investments and not everyone can do it. However, the creators of social networks have prepared for advertisers some additional obstacles to the hearts of buyers.

Today we publish the top 5 social media troublesthat we learned about in the process. Maybe this will help you not to step on the same rake.


5th place. Dead Souls
This is the only item on 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 for each of the top ten. Moreover, the activity is very specific. Users respond to any post either with a massive “Thank you !!!!!!!!”, “Super!”, “Class !!”, while no one goes to the site indicated in the post (and all the content on the site, where they come from found out that it’s super - unclear), or the answers are generally inadequate.

Invitations to a group are practically useless - even in Vkontakte, full of spam, the conversion of invitees to our groups into users = about 6%, in My world conversion = 0. Apparently, users are on the site so rarely 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 on our Twitter showed 2000. It didn’t happen in one day, because we tried to choose our friends according to our interests, made sure that we were followed in response and did not belong to aggressive mass followers. But what other way is there to share your microblog with Twitter users?

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 fall out with everyone 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 - it is so cynical to get rid of friends. Therefore, we start every day with calculations of how many tweeters we can tell you about our blog today :)

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

3rd place. Let's say no to traditional marketing.
It’s now fashionable to scold Vkontakte on Habré. And although it’s absolutely not desirable to scold just like that, some actions of the administration are unpleasantly surprising. HereAlready discussed that the abolition of bonuses for friends dramatically slowed down the development of the application market. And from the point of view of any normal marketer, this is understandable. Promotions “gift for a purchase”, bonus and referral programs - all recognized, working marketing tools to attract new customers. Why did they fall out of favor with Vkontakte? It remains a mystery to us.

2nd place. Earned - try to spend.
Here all the same heroes. After our Vkontakte application ( VoiceCards ) nevertheless earned a couple of hundreds of votes, we began to think how to use them as useful as possible. They wrote a lot about the withdrawal of votes, so we are not considering this option.

Application advertising is the first thing that comes to mind. Tried, tested. Average CPC - 0.21 votes, conversion to application installations 25%, conversion to purchases 4% - indicators are generally good, but plus advertising does not work. Moreover, with such a low rate of traffic, it is unbearably small. For some reason, the traditional strategy of lowering the bid due to narrower targeting (in contextual advertising systems) does not work here. Quite the contrary - trying to increase the effectiveness of our ads and making them more targeted, we get a significant increase in cost ...

We decided to agree with popular groups and recommend our application on these sites. Practice has shown that the conversion to the installation here is much higher, because users trust the groups in which they are active. But since July, it is forbidden to transfer votes earned in the application to other Vkontakte users. So here ...

And suddenly Vkontakte allowed the advertising of external links. Hurrah! But no ... it’s also impossible to translate the votes earned by the application into such ads.

1st place. Make your bets, gentlemen!
Who is the winner of our small rating? Drum roll ... Yes, yes, these are they, beloved Odnoklassniki. Anyone who has ever done a group at Odnoklassniki does not need to explain that it’s just pi ...rather laborious work. But the sad thing is that in groups you cannot put direct links to external resources. Nowhere. Neither in the description, nor in the comments, nor in the news.

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

So, I quote the official commercial offer: “A commercial group is highlighted with a premium icon on the group’s main page and an asterisk in the group list. Provided features: placing a link to a client’s site in the group’s title, direct addressing to the group, collecting statistics via Google Analytics, placing Iframe on the group’s page, the ability to create private photo albums. "

Well now guess how many bills you need to make in order 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 versed in prices in the online advertising market in Russia, we give an indicative comparison. For 1.5 million rubles you can: 16 million12,500,000 times show ads on the Yandex main page; to buy 17 647 transitions from Vkontakte (again and again I am convinced how high they have СРС) or 10 years to conduct a corporate blog on Habré at the coolest rate. In a word, a little expensive.

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

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