VK is the biggest and the most visited social network in Russia. It has over 230 million users and over 54 million of them visit the website each day. About 65% of users live in Russia, with half of the VK audience being older than 25 years. As VK attracts so many users in Russia, there is a great deal of potential to promote your company’s goods and services.
Here are some opportunities you can use on Vkontakte.
Russian web-space is a mystery for many foreign companies. One of the tricks is to utilise Russian social media giant VK or Vkontakte. Today Relevance is going to help you to understand what VK is.
1. Groups and Pages
VK has two types of public pages you can create to promote your services; Groups and Pages.
Groups are mainly dedicated for friends having something in common to discuss. In general, everyone in a Group can start a discussion on the ‘wall’, or express themselves using pictures, audio files or videos. You should also note that once you sign up to a group, you can invite your friends to do the same. So if you feel your business is an interesting topic for discussion – create a Group.
Pages are more about informing your audience. If you have a magazine, or are looking for ways to share your news with customers, a Page is probably the better choice. You can still enable the followers of your Page to leave comments, but they cannot invite their friends to ‘join the discussion’.
Both Pages and Groups have various options you can change: switch the comments on or off; enable users to upload this or that content etc. So it means that you can customise your VK page in a way that suits your business.
2. Targeted Ads
VK collects detailed information about users including their home city, schools, jobs, hobbies and even their political preferences, ideology and their attitude to smoking. All this information permits VK to offer companies very detailed targeting options.
VK offers a wide range of targeting settings to help you promote your VK Group, VK Page or even website. Choose a nice picture, add a short piece of text, choose your target audience, pay and voila – your ad is already online. If you are promoting your VK Page you can even include a ‘Join the Group’ button.
Pricing depends on your preferences and you can pay per click or per 1,000 impressions. The price for each click/impression is determined by auction. You can also start and stop your campaign anytime you want by the click of a button.
Another good thing about VK ads is that the user sees no more than two ads at the time and they are placed just below the reminder about friends’ birthdays, so the ads are never too annoying and they definitely catch the attention. A short time ago, VK launched video ads as well.
3. Games
Hundreds of VK users play different games directly on the website. Why not use a game to catch the attention of a potential customer?
You can use various ways to make loyal gamers visit your website, sign up for your newsletter or even become a customer of your goods and services by offering a game they could enjoy. The most successful games can even have a viral effect and spread over the network in the space of a few days.
And never forget about targeting: you can target your ads, working with games and other VK applications.
VK is a massive help for those who are ready to penetrate Russian web space and it offers various useful tools to do it easily.
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