Maintaining a VKontakte group: tips for beginners and secrets for business

VKontakte is a social network where users can create profiles, communicate with each other, share photos, listen to music, create playlists and more. Vkontakte is available both in the browser and as a mobile application.

The Vkontakte network is interesting as a marketing tool with a large reach, flexible targeting settings and various advertising formats, which, among other things, generate traffic to the site. Considering the number of active users on the site - about 26 million people with a gender distribution of almost 50% to 50%, this is also a huge concentration of an active Internet audience.

Checklist for creating and setting up a company page from scratch

Register on a social network using your email or Facebook account, or log into your account if you already have one. When registering, you must be linked to a mobile phone, which guarantees security against hacking.
Go to the “My Groups” section and choose to create a group, public page or event.

A group is created to unite people into a community of interests.
A public page is created to directly promote a personal brand or company.
An event is created to publicize and organize a planned concert, party, meeting, etc. (for business, creating an event page within the group itself is more suitable).

Create a group

A group is created literally in one click. You need to select the “Group” option, define a “topic” and click the “Create Community” button.
After creating a community, a block appears for filling the group with information

When filling out the information, you must choose whether to leave the group open or make it closed. You can make these settings later.
After filling out and saving all the fields, the group page opens, which needs to be designed visually (choose a cover, an avatar, fill albums with photos) and fill it with basic content.

It’s best to start recruiting people into the group after publishing the first 10 posts.

Creating a public page

If you need to create a public page, you must also select a topic and click the “Create Community” button.
You will then be asked to select a page type.
Then you need to fill out all the necessary information. The difference from a group is that the page cannot be closed - it will be available to everyone.
After filling out the basic and additional information, you need to add an avatar and cover to the page, fill out albums and product cards. It’s worth developing a template for posts in advance so that the community’s content stands out from other communities in the user’s feed.
Fill the community with basic content (minimum 10 posts).

Encourage questions in the group

If no one in your group asks any questions, that's bad. This may indicate that the group has not gathered the right audience. Again, it’s difficult to sell something to indifferent people. Someone may be interested, but he is embarrassed to ask - after all, no one asks here!

It's like in a bar - you come to a bar where music is playing and everyone is dancing - and you yourself will dance. Or do you come to a bar where no one is dancing - it takes a lot of courage to go out first and start dancing?

It's the same in the group. People look at what is “accepted” here. If it is customary here to ask questions, if they are answered, then they will also ask questions.

Sometimes it helps to create a separate “discussion” in your VKontakte group, where you just write your questions, and post something like “we’ll be happy to answer your questions.”

And finally, for the initial promotion of activity in the group, you will most likely have to simulate it. There's no escape. If there is no example, people will not follow it. That is - either with the help of your friends, or with the help of activity from the same service like forumok.com - you create a certain stream (not necessarily large) of questions in your feed or in a discussion in your group, and answer them on behalf of the company (community ). This will definitely help group members to “embrace” and ask questions on the topic.

We cannot write enough to overstate the importance of this. Activity is very important in the group, because from a question to a sale is one step. If there is complete “silence” in a group, it is very difficult to imagine that it will sell anything.

Does running a VKontakte group seem too complicated? But you also need to unwind it? Take advantage of our services for the entire range of promotion on social networks.

Did you like our article? We have more - read our blog. We freely share a lot of useful material. Even if you decide to promote on social networks yourself, our articles will make your life much easier.

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How to maintain a VKontakte account

What content to publish

Content about the company and products: stories about corporate culture, mission, values, communicating the USP of the product.
News about the company, promotions and discounts.
Entertainment content: memes, photo collections, etc.
Images of the behind-the-scenes life of the company, which shows the “inner kitchen”, a story about the employees.
User Content. It is tracked both on VKontakte and on other sites. Can be used as feedback from customers and increasing loyalty among the audience.
Quotes. They can be designed both on the picture itself and in plain text with a selection of photos. To design such posts, you can use the Canva graphic editor.
The use of situational marketing, when a brand uses situational news items in its content.
Infographics. An excellent format for presenting information with a large amount of digital data.
Expert articles. If a company is engaged, for example, in educational activities, then it is worth conveying its expertise to the audience.
Useful content, for example, in the “did you know?” format. or number of the day.
Survey for community/public members.

How to select content

There are three types of content in the content funnel:

Entertaining: evokes emotions in the audience
Expert: Educates the audience
Branded: increases product recognition by stylizing pages or their individual elements to match its appearance or external features.

There is no clear rule about how much there should be. The main thing is not to fill the community with branded content alone.

Today there are more than 40 content formats on the market; it’s worth trying each of them and seeing the audience’s reaction. VKontakte is also an ideal platform for working with audience loyalty. And if the main goal is to provide customer support, you should give preference to this particular social network.

How to choose an audience

Thanks to its wide targeting capabilities, you can select almost any audience segment, from the most basic settings (age, gender) to travelers. All necessary settings are set in the advertising account.

How often to post

There is no clear rule on how many posts you should publish per day. Everything is individual and depends on the topic. You need to experiment and see how the audience reacts. As a starting point, you can take 1-2 posts per day.

How to promote

VKontakte has wide advertising opportunities, both to attract an audience to the group and to increase traffic to the site.

How to properly design a freewriter’s work page?

5 key points

Name. It must be "human". Let it be a pseudonym, but consisting of a normal first and last name.

Avatar. It should be a good close-up portrait. Preferably in a business suit (or just formal clothes, but certainly not a bikini). Imagine that you are meeting a new customer on the threshold of your office. Smile at him!

By the way, these are the very basics of personal marketing. And a universal recommendation for both social networks and freelancing sites. Read about the basics of building your brand here →

Status (line under name). A great place for your USP or the hottest offer! If there are none, write a few words there about what you do.

Look at how the status is designed on the page of the landing goddess Nadezhda Bogdanova. The landing page customer will immediately see that he has come to the right address!

Section "Photos". The most recently added photos are visible under your personal information. Let there be only image images: diplomas, certificates.

You can remove unnecessary photos from this block - hover your mouse over the photo, a cross (“hide”) will appear in the upper right corner. Click on it - the photo will be removed from the main block (all photos will be saved in albums).

Check your privacy settings : your work page should be visible to everyone on the Internet so that customers can easily find you. Clients and colleagues should be able to send you a message (Settings - Privacy - Contact Me).

The sections for video recordings and audio recordings are located at the bottom and do not play such a big role.

Paid and free promotion formats

Paid

Public advertising - posting a post in groups with a similar target audience (posting is done through a public exchange, for example Sociate).
Targeted advertising (see options here).
Post promotion (photo or video) - advertising publications in the news feed. Settings are carried out in the advertising account.
Buying offers is inviting users who, for a certain reward, join a group and perform actions in it. You can purchase offers from companies like B-Like. It is considered not the best way to promote due to the low quality of the acquired audience.

Free

Publishing interesting and high-quality content
Invitation to personal messages - the community administrator sends personal messages to the audience inviting them to join the community
Conducting competitions where one of the rules is mandatory membership in a group or subscription to a public page.

Creating a visual and semantic component

The next step is description. When you create a community, the settings will open where you need to act. Public pages are indexed in search engines, so write a meaningful post about yourself, your services and what the reader will find on this resource. For example, this is what information about Semantica looks like.

This is a window in which the name and other data are changed. There is one more way to get into it. In the top right corner, find three dots, open the drop-down list and select “Manage.”

Then upload your avatar and cover photo. The images you choose should be unique, eye-catching, and relevant to the theme of the blog.

First image: 200*500px; thumbnail: 200*200px.
Second: 1590*400px.

Change the necessary settings. In “Sections”, check the boxes next to the tools that you want to see in the public: photo albums, links, products, audio recordings, contacts and others. Also in this menu there is a transition to your personal account, where you can connect advertising.

Where should links in posts lead to the site?

There are several options:

Landing page	Task
to Home Page	familiarizing the audience with the company and its activities
To the catalog page	sale directly on the company website
To landing page	getting leads
To the company blog	creating an image of the company as an expert in its field

Basic paid and free forms of content

Paid formats

Targeted advertising

Advertising in public pages

Promoting posts in the feed

Free formats

Holding a competition

Invitation in private messages - a welcome invitation letter for another user

Free promotion methods

Publishing interesting and high-quality content

Maximum response from the target audience

Due to the large volumes of content appearing in a user's feed, there is a risk that posts may not be noticed.

Invitation to private messages

Point of contact with the target audience

High probability of being banned/blocked (if users actively click the “spam” button in response)
You can send a maximum of 20 messages per day to “non-friends”.

Conducting competitions

Opportunity to increase loyalty among the audience

There is a high probability of collecting prize-catchers (people hunting for competitions) in the competition, who will subsequently unsubscribe from the community.

Paid promotion methods

Advertising in public pages

Large coverage
Point of contact with the target audience.

There is a high risk that the audience will not notice the message due to the large volume of publications in the public itself.
Risk of having a low-quality audience

Targeted advertising

Flexible targeting settings.
Ability to customize advertising to competitors' audiences.
Ability to customize narrow audience segments.

High price
Low level of transitions to the site from the social network in comparison with search.
Low motivation of the network audience to click on the ad, since users come to VK, first of all, to communicate, and not to buy.

Post promotion

Native placement (definition: a message that is perceived not as advertising, but as material useful to the audience). The post is not perceived as advertising.
Possibility of getting into the feed of users who are not subscribed to the public.
Low cost per click.

Low-quality audience.
The probability of not being seen in the user's feed.
The function is only available for groups of 5,000 people or more.

Purchasing offers

Low cost per offer.
Fast promotion of the community.
Minor activity.

A high percentage of unsubscribing or blocking cheated participants.
There is a high probability that the page will be blocked by the VKontakte administration.

What is a "work page"?

What do we mean by “work page”? This is your professional account. An ordinary personal page on a social network that is created for communication. Customers are people too, and they are pleased to see that texts are written by a living person.

But this page represents you not just as an individual, but as a professional.

After all, we consider it normal to have a separate (work, as opposed to home) phone number for business contacts.

In the same way, a freewriter can have a work account on a social network . If you decide to leave your personal page as a working page, check how it is designed.

Imagine that you are the owner of a website. You have just received proposals from two copywriters. It seems interesting, but you want to find out more about them first, and then decide on cooperation. We go to a social network - and what do we see?

Agree that a girl in business clothes at her desk looks more like a specialist who takes her work seriously and knows her job than a girl in a swimsuit.

A professional page on a social network is your business card. On VKontakte we can not only communicate with existing clients, but also get acquainted with potential customers, build trusting relationships with them, and increase loyalty. And people are greeted by their clothes—in this case, by your page.

This means that the page should be designed so that all elements work for your image, and not against it .

On the other hand, if you don’t have your own website yet, the VKontakte page will replace it , because on it you can place: