Social media promotion

What the service includes

We take on running business accounts on social media and targeted advertising aimed at a specific business goal: leads, sales, subscriptions, reaching a target segment. At the start we analyze the product, the audience and the current metrics, put together a content plan a month ahead and a brief for the creatives. Then we launch ad campaigns, run funnel analytics and each week compare the cost per lead and the payback against plan. If the client already has a marketing department or a CRM, we embed social media promotion into their processes rather than building a parallel loop. In the end the client gets not a report on likes but measurable figures on the cost of the result.

How the process really works

Any campaign rests on three connected blocks: audience segmentation, creatives for each segment, and end-to-end analytics that shows what worked. First we describe the hypotheses — to whom, with what message and through which format we show the ad — then we split the budget into parallel ad groups to test those hypotheses. The platforms' ad algorithms optimize impressions for the set goal, but the direction and the constraints are set by the setup: the goal, the audience, the bids, the placements. We turn off the weak bundles, pour the budget into the ones where the cost of the result is lower, and so step by step lower the cost per lead. This is an engineering cycle — hypothesis, measurement, adjustment — not a one-off post published in hopes of reach.

How this field came to be

The first social network with profiles and connections between users is generally considered to be SixDegrees, launched in 1997, and it became a mass phenomenon with the arrival of MySpace in 2003 and Facebook in 2004. Around the same time, circa 2004, the term "social media" itself took hold, after which brands began to view the platforms as a separate communication channel. The paid side grew out of contextual advertising: Google launched AdWords in October 2000, and that set the model of an auction and pay-for-results. Targeted advertising in its current form started on 8 November 2007, when Facebook opened a standalone ad account with targeting by age, gender, city, education and relationship status — data that users specified about themselves. From that point on, social media promotion stopped being organic posts and became a managed system with setup and a budget.

Why precise setup is critical

The result in advertising is determined not by the size of the budget but by the precision of the setup: an error in the audience or the campaign goal burns money quietly, without visible failures. The algorithm honestly does what it was told, so a wrongly chosen optimization goal leads to cheap clicks and zero leads — formally everything works, but there are no sales. Correct event tracking, conversion transfer and audience segmentation are the software part without which analytics shows a distorted picture and decisions are made blindly. We treat the ad account as a configurable system: we check the counters, events and data transfer before letting a real budget loose on the bundle. The cleaner the setup and measurement, the faster the working combination is found and the lower the final cost of the result.

What tools we work with

The service's stack is targeted advertising, a content plan and analytics, and each block relies on specific platform tools. On the advertising side we work through the social networks' native ad accounts: audience setup, look-alikes based on the client's database, retargeting by events, A/B tests of creatives and bids. We run the content plan as a publishing calendar tied to the ad launches, so that organic and paid traffic reinforce each other rather than living separately. We collect analytics through web-statistics systems and platform pixels: we record the path from impression to lead and calculate the cost at each step of the funnel. If the client has a CRM, we connect conversion transfer so that ads optimize for real deals rather than intermediate clicks.

When the key tools appeared

The base tools of the stack took shape within a fairly narrow window in the mid-2000s. Web analytics started at scale when Google bought the company Urchin in April 2005 and in November 2005 released Google Analytics built on it — a counter with campaign tagging became available for free. The auction model of paid advertising grew out of Google AdWords, launched in October 2000, while audience targeting as a separate tool took shape with Facebook's ad account on 8 November 2007. The combination of these three things — analytics, an auction and targeting by user data — is the foundation that social media promotion rests on today. The tools have since grown automation around them, but the logic of measurement and optimization has stayed the same as the one laid down in 2005–2007.

Why you can trust this to us

ASI Robotics is a development team with combined experience of more than 45 years in IT, and we approach advertising as an engineering task rather than a creative stream. We write the software and analytics part: we set up the accounts, events and conversion transfer and check the whole bundle on a test budget before the production launch, so the money doesn't go into a wrongly assembled system. It's important to understand the frame: we prepare the program, the setup and the analytics, while the platforms, algorithms and impressions themselves are the social networks' tools that we manage for the client's task. We have the same principle in our other services too: where it's about cutting, welding, 3D printing or warehouse robots, physically the cutting, welding, printing and hauling is done by the client's equipment, and we write the program for it and do the setup. Thanks to measurements at every step of the funnel, the client sees not promises but figures on the cost of the result and can verify the return on the investment.