How to start developing your own group in Vkontacte?
One of the most popular Social Media in Russia is still VKontakte. It has recently enjoyed a sustained period of growth. From December 2016 to December 2020 the company gained over 14 million active mobile users, amounting to 66.6 million mobile active users in the last observed period.
There are also many solvent users, among whom millennials, with over two thirds of users under the age of 34. When broken down by regions, Saint Petersburg was leading, with half of the population actively using the platform. Roughly 20 percent of the total population was actively using Vkontakte countrywide in 2019.
So if there are your target audience, you shouldn’t ignore this marketing channel. But how to start developing your own group in Vkontacte? First of all, you should define goals of promotion.
Defining the goal of promotion
Before you start promoting products and services on VKontakte, decide on the goal. You can create and promote a community in order to:
- 1. Search for customers.
2. Promote the site.
3. Share company news.
4. Increase brand awareness and audience loyalty.
These goals can be combined, but it is important for you to define them clearly. The VKontakte promotion strategy may differ depending on your goal. If the goal is sales, then you can not do without selling posts, discounts for subscribers and uploading products to the public.
If you need to promote vkontakte to improve your image, then there will be less selling content in the community, and more useful information content. The methods of recruiting subscribers will also be slightly different.
If you decided on the goal, you should choose what to develop – a group or a page.
What is better for promoting a business on VKontakte: a group or a page
In a nutshell, a group is more suitable for exchanging opinions about a product or service, and a public page is more suitable for selling and publishing official information about your company.
Group features
- 1. In a group, subscribers can publish posts and lead discussions themselves – this is a good source of content and a way to « keep alive ». You only need to keep order and set the correct vector of communication.
2. If necessary, the group can be closed from those who are not its members. For commercial purposes they do this, for example, when they hold a voting contest to avoid cheating.
According to the terms of the contest, only a member of the group can vote.
3. A group can be managed by several people-administrators or editors. This will come in handy when the promotion of the community in the VK will bear fruit and you yourself will no longer be able or do not want to moderate and create content.
Features of the public page
- 1. More suitable for publishing official information, ideal for the media and improving the brand image.
2. It is displayed on the user’s page, so it can be seen by everyone who visits his page.
3. Absolutely all information on the public page is available to everyone, even those who are not registered in the VK.
4. Minus the promotion of the VK page – it is impossible to invite friends there, there is no such function.
The promotion of the public VKontakte is more focused on sales and customers, so we recommend it this method. But in fairness, we note that the VK group as a selling tool also works and has the right to exist.
How to start promoting a VKontakte group
The creation and proper design of the community is the next stage of the online promotion of VKontakte. And then you immediately need to do everything according to the rules. Because if mistakes are made at this stage, further promotion efforts may be ineffective.
Title
The correct name of your community is a guarantee that you will get to the TOP of the VKontakte search. Therefore, you should choose the name not based on personal preferences, but on keywords-the names of your product or service. If your brand is already known and you are being searched for by name, you can include it in the name. But more often it is no need.
A typical mistake is to use several keywords of your topic in the name of a group at once in the hope that the group will get to the TOP for all at once. We do not recommend doing this, because the TOP fall, first of all, those groups and pages that match the search query, and the more accurate, the higher.
Another criterion is the number of participants. But if you start leading a group, you only need to rely on the name. By the way, do not forget to evaluate the competitiveness of the selected keyword for the name.
Enter your key in the VK search and see how many groups and with how many participants there are already.
Do not take too frequent a request, which gives dozens of groups with hundreds of thousands of subscribers – it will be difficult to » bypass » them. It is better to choose a medium-frequency query, and later, when your group is promoted, change the name.
In the process of promoting vk, you may have to change the name of the group more than once.
Experimenting with the name is normal, fortunately, VKontakte gives this opportunity.
Description
The need to optimize the description of the community is what unites the promotion of VKontakte and SEO promotion So that the group appears in the search engine results, optimize it with keywords.
Make the description succinct and informative. It should not go to « Show in full », people are unlikely to make an extra click to finish reading it. The purpose of the description is to describe your activities and advantages in a nutshell.
Design
The design of the VK community is not a whim, but an important selling element. We recommend a thorough approach to it, because the design of the menu, avatars and thumbnails create a first impression of your community and affect people better than the text.
Basic requirements for the design of the community:
- 1. The avatar and banner for groups must be of high quality.
2. Images should reflect your theme.
3. They should be easy to read in desktop and mobile versions.
When you finished all these steps, you can start to post in your new group or public page. And if you need a help with this, just contact us! We know how to promote your business in Russia!