Today, in order to promote a VK group and keep it active, you need both time and money. The times when this could be done for three kopecks are over, although not, but you will learn about this later.
In this instruction you will not find free methods because they are not effective at all. The owners of the social network VKontakte have long made sure that you spend as much money as possible within their system. After all, wonderful tools have been developed for this: targeting and market - platform (formerly the exchange).
This article will help you save both money and time when promoting and recruiting subscribers for your group. You will do all this yourself and from scratch without resorting to the paid services of SMM specialists.
Keywords in the title
Even when creating a group, think carefully about the name: about the pros and cons of different options. For example, I believe that both your brand and keywords should be in the title. For example, Blog of Abdullin Ruslan | how to build muscles.
A brand is useful because over time people will begin to recognize you. And keywords are useful especially at first, when no one knows about you yet. And keywords immediately make it clear what your public page is about.
And that is not all. People often search for groups through keyword searches. If the name of your community contains such words, then people will find you.
It is important that the frequency of requests for different phrases differs. There are topics that are more popular, and there are narrower, more specialized ones. You can roughly estimate the frequency using the Yandex service wordstat.yandex.ru (only it shows the frequency of queries in Yandex search, in the non-social network Vkontakte).
Don't neglect this free traffic source.
More about promotion
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Promotion on social networks is a rather complex and time-consuming procedure that requires taking into account a lot of factors. However, despite all the accompanying problems and nuances, it is precisely this that allows your business to reach a new level, significantly increasing profits and increasing turnover. At the beginning of running public pages and communities, you usually worry about each follower, but gradually the situation begins to change. A thousand subscriptions arrive, followed by a second, and somewhere around the fifth there comes a turning point when you can finally see growth.
Since then, the work of an administrator has changed dramatically. If previously all his efforts were spent on attracting new users, now he must learn to quickly respond to incoming messages and requests, monitor the flow of spam, and keep abreast of all current trends and tendencies.
However, in order to achieve the natural development of the public, serious work is required, which does not tolerate even the smallest miscalculations and inaccuracies. If you choose the right promotion tactics, you will very soon notice results and be able to realize your goals and plans.
Choosing a group name
Are you familiar with the saying: “Whatever you name a boat, that’s how it will float”? The same principle applies to VK communities. The number of search queries and organic coverage depend on the chosen name. The easiest way to ensure traffic is to add some popular keyword phrase.
What are the advantages of such a solution:
- eliminates the need to come up with a creative and original name;
- does not require verification of registration of similar trademarks.
For example, the option “Italian pizza and pasta in St. Petersburg” will not only inform users about the products being promoted, but will also bring additional views, clicks and visits.
Of course, inserting keys into the title is not a mandatory option. If you wish, you can easily experiment and come up with something cool and memorable that fits into the general concept of the business. However, this is a more complex and painstaking alternative.
Keywords in the title: should they be present and how to find them
If you are not ready to immediately offer a bright and unique name, feel free to turn to the keys. First, it will buy you time to design a more interesting and engaging sign. Secondly, it will allow you to get an additional flow of new people. The only question is where to look for these same “keywords”? The best option is the Yandex.WordStat service. Representing a huge database, it allows you to select frequently requested phrases.
Some useful tips for use:
- Try to describe the community using different verbal categories - this will help determine which requests are dominant.
- Avoid overspam, don’t use too many words with the same root in a row - such techniques always hurt your eyes and create a negative impression.
In addition, it is important not to forget that the name is the business card of the public. The future fate of the brainchild depends on how responsibly you approach its choice.
Subtleties of content
Having found a suitable name, do not rush to relax, because everything is just beginning. A bright cover can attract the attention of the audience, however, only high-quality content will make them linger. Hence the next rule of individual promotion - take a responsible approach to compiling posts, work on content plans, strictly adhere to the publication schedule.
How to promote a group on VK yourself and gain subscribers using content:
- Consider the main topic. So, for example, if your blog is dedicated to various culinary subtleties, you should not post entries about the personal lives of stars, share accounting reports and other materials that do not fit into a given concept.
- Don't disappear from your feed for too long. Experienced SMM specialists recommend making at least six posts a day. Otherwise, you risk losing a significant number of views and visits.
- Don't ignore your target audience. In particular, you should pay attention to the gender and age of those people who are subscribed to your community.
Well, and, of course, the published content must be unique. Otherwise, he will not be able to reach the top.
Decor
There are no strict rules regarding what a group should look like. The main thing is to develop a sense of observation, to monitor current trends and tendencies. If you are new to the SMM world and are not well versed in the existing subtleties and nuances, start monitoring the most popular and promoted communities. In fact, their design is a kind of template that you can rely on in your own activities.
To be fair, it is worth noting that professionals should work on the visual component. Fortunately, today you can easily find suitable freelance designers on specialized exchanges and platforms. As for prices, you will have to pay at least five thousand rubles for a stylish designer design.
What design elements should you not skimp on:
- covers;
- menu items/options;
- hats.
It is also recommended that photos and videos published in the feed be kept in the same style.
Invite friends and tell friends
Here I combined two free methods at once. They are similar and very simple. You are required to do very simple actions, a little even routine if you have a lot of friends.
What you need to do:
- Login to your group
- In the menu on the right, click on the “invite friends” link
- A window will appear to invite friends. At the bottom, click on “invite friends from the full list”
- We invite you to our group. As a result, each of your friends will receive a notification asking them to join.
If I'm not mistaken, you are allowed to invite up to 50 friends per day this way. You will have to stretch out the pleasure over several days or weeks.
And there is one more action left. In your community menu, click the “tell your friends” link. And send yourself a message like this on your wall:
You can get creative and come up with a better call to action.
Ways to independently promote a VK group
According to statistics, the vast majority of community owners promote themselves. [google_other] If you do everything at random, every day following the next recommendations of nameless bloggers, you won’t expect a positive result. Promotion must be comprehensive. There are a lot of services that promise to get subscribers on VK for free and quickly, or offer to buy a program for getting subscribers on VK, but they are usually of little use.
When promoting a VKontakte group on your own, until you reach 15-20 subscribers, you can try the following methods:
- Personal invitations to friends . Telling your friends that a new community has appeared online is the first thing to do. But the number of people you know personally is probably limited to a few hundred. VKontakte has special limits; they change every year. As of 2021, you can add 40 people as friends. It is highly undesirable to exceed this limit and receive a message from the social network that “that’s enough for today.”
- Sending personal messages to strangers who meet the criteria with an invitation to the group. This method is quite rightly called spam. But you can use a trick. Before sending a link to your community to a complete stranger, you should establish at least some contact with him - like a photo, a post. In this case, responsiveness will increase significantly.
- Creation of competitions and sweepstakes . This is a “content method” that greatly helps attract subscribers to the VK group. You can give away anything that is of value to potential subscribers. This could be a free membership to the fitness center, a fruit basket delivered to your home, or a family photo shoot. The winner is usually selected live using a random number generation service. Advertising of the competition is achieved by a mandatory condition: only the one who talked about the event on his page can win.
- Ordering advertising in other communities and mutual advertising . Marketers joke that a sausage for two is half a sausage for each, but one subscriber can successfully be a member of two or more communities. Find groups in your niche with similar indicators and offer to exchange mutual advertising. At the same time, buy advertising in more popular public pages.
- Ordering advertising in other communities and mutual advertising . This is the best way to promote a VK group. When purchasing visitors, you can choose their city of residence, gender, age, interests, and even find out the list of groups they are already a member of. You can achieve a significant reduction in costs by pre-configuring an advertising campaign in the Cerebro.Target program.
Automatic promotion services
Automatic reposting services provide the opportunity to repost messages from groups on similar topics to your group.
They save a lot of time and help you schedule posts several days or even weeks in advance.
All of them are paid, some of the best include:
- Buffer
- Hootsuite
- Socialpilot
Screenshot of the main page of the hootsuite.com service
Automatic commenting services are designed for publishing messages with a link to your group in other people's groups. This is an extremely undesirable method of promotion, which leads to nothing but problems. If you take responsibility for possible consequences and are ready to publish a comment that is unique and useful for someone else’s community in each specific case, use Amplifr.
Increase likes, comments, subscribers
Screenshot of the personal account of the Olike service
Getting live subscribers into a VK group is a myth. You can only cheat bots or motivated users who join the community and receive a reward.
Used by administrators who have one (or both) of the following goals:
- Impress advertisers . It’s easier to sell advertising in a community that has 300 thousand subscribers, despite the fact that half of them are fake. Some owners think so. Advertisers, however, not all know that the number of subscribers and likes essentially means nothing. Audience response is important. Nevertheless, due to their simplicity and reliability, cheating services are very popular.
- At the initial stage, when you need to attract the first users . It is easier for a community with 10 thousand users to attract new subscribers than a beginner group with only a hundred. Promotion services really help to cope with this problem.
Top services for getting likes and comments:
- Olike – This website reports a huge user base (almost 3 million) and offers 450 followers or 900 likes for just 1000 rubles.
- Vkstorm is a flexible service with which you can create a task, describe what exactly is required from the contractor and set your own price.
- V-like – you can start an advertising campaign with a budget of only 5 rubles. With V-like it’s easy to make friends, subscribers, and also order maintenance of activity in the group (publication of news and comments).
Write to people from groups on your topic
Now here's a rather complicated method. It's my opinion ?
You should find other communities related to your topic. Use the search function in the VK community section.
And then you need to somehow bring these people into your community. Here are a few options at a glance:
- Write to people in personal communities and suggest your group (some will complain and you may be blocked)
- Participate in comments, discussions and casually advertise your public page (moderators or admins may block you)
As I wrote above, this method is not easy. You need to show imagination, creativity and find a lot of free time. I don't really like this kind of work. Moreover, the return from such actions is unlikely to be decent.
I know that there are even paid programs that monitor the public pages you specify. As soon as a new person joins the tracked community, you automatically send them a message with your offer. In this case, you need to use specially created accounts, as they block.
Mutual PR
This option is suitable if you have already gained your first subscribers. Now find similar communities with approximately the same number of participants as yours.
Pay attention to whether there is movement in the group: if there are likes, comments. If people are active, that's very good.
Write to the admin and suggest mutual PR. The point is very simple. You share his post in your group, and he shares your post in his. As a result, some members of his group will follow you, and some of yours will follow him.
As a result, everything is positive. It is important to find communities that are close to your level of development.
Prologue - content needed
Before you start promoting a group, you need to start filling it with content . You should already have at least 10 good and high-quality posts posted in the community - read this article about this. Until you have content in the group, attracting people there will actually not work or will be very expensive. We need to start with having content.
And there is one more point - imagine two different communities on the same topic and with approximately the same content:
- In the first group there is practically no communication, and questions asked by participants often remain unanswered by the owner
- In the second group, as soon as a question arises, the group owner gives an answer, and other participants gradually enter into communication: the group is full of questions and answers in the comments.
Which group do you think is easier to attract people to? Of course, in the second - in which communication takes place.
Until recently, it was difficult to track comments in your communities, now there is a cool Chotam service for this - use it to track comments in your community.
Now let’s move on to the actual promotion mechanisms:
We give you a relatively universal method that is suitable in 95% of cases.
Guest Posts
What is a guest post? This is when you have prepared unique interesting material and post it on the page of another thematic public. This post contains a link to your blog.
The number of clicks on your public link directly depends on the interest and demand of your post. So try and show your target audience that you can solve their problems.
If you have really cool material, then your guest post will even be published for free. Everything is positive. If you have nothing special to share, then the option of posting a post for money is possible.
Attractive community appearance
First, you need to give the group a bright and memorable name, upload a beautiful avatar and a themed cover. All this will make the group noticeable, original and recognizable, where there will be no shame in adding friends, who will become the first readers of the public.
Attention! Psychologists say that the general impression of a group is created by the header, the main picture and the first three posts. Therefore, they need to be given the closest attention. Compliance with the theme, originality and imagery will be an excellent start to successful promotion!
Advertising in groups
As a continuation of the paid methods, you can buy advertising in thematic groups. Advertising for your public page can be placed in different places:
- on the wall,
- in the message pinned above on the wall,
- In the link block,
- and other places.
I have never used this type of advertising, so I don’t know all the nuances and placements.
When I just started actively recruiting subscribers to my public page, one advertiser immediately wrote to me and offered his services. I refused:
- Firstly, the public was off topic,
- secondly, the prices were high,
- thirdly, I didn’t plan this at all.
But keep in mind, you will also be offered advertising services. But it’s better to find groups of your competitors that are suitable for advertising.
Competitions and giveaways
I am sure you have encountered this phenomenon in contact. When you subscribe, like, or share, you participate in a drawing and have a chance to win a valuable prize. Sometimes it's money, sometimes it's free services, sometimes it's a real valuable prize that you can touch with your hands.
And you can launch a similar competition.
My advice. To give people real motivation to participate, prepare a good, valuable prize. If you have a fitness or rocking group, you can raffle off some useful equipment, or if it’s about self-development, then a best-selling book. And also such thematic prizes will cut off unnecessary people who are not interested.
In general, think about how you would interest your target audience.
How to determine the target audience?
Let's look at how to create a portrait of an ideal subscriber using the example of a commercial public page.
Let's say you need to promote a group of the Okna Plus company, which, as you might guess, is promoting plastic windows. So, step by step we ask ourselves the following questions.
3 questions to determine the portrait of your target audience
- What segment do you operate in? First, decide in which segment you plan to work: B2B or B2C. Simply put, these are individuals or companies.
- What is the purpose of the purchase? Why is your product or service needed? What customer pain points do they solve? Why is it profitable for him to buy from you?
- Who is your buyer? Determine the age, gender, marital status of potential subscribers? Consider their needs, interests, desires, hobbies. Even if we are talking about B2B, you will have to deal with people. Therefore, find out in advance who most often makes the decision. This will allow you to determine his needs and correctly draw up a promotion strategy.
These questions provide a basic understanding of your target audience. They also apply if you are promoting a public page on Instagram.
But before you start promoting a group in contact, it is advisable to segment all potential subscribers into different types with a detailed description of their needs. This will allow you to develop a cool content plan with posts that will reach the group members as much as possible. That is, they will begin to be active in the form of reposts and comments, which will speed up the promotion process.
We will talk about design rules, content plan and posts later. And now I propose to move on to the most pressing topic. How can you still attract visitors to the group?
Targeted advertising
There is a “Community Advertising” link in your group menu. After clicking on it, you will be taken to the mode of creating an advertising post, under which there will be a button to join the community.
Write why your group is valuable, make a call to action to get people to join. Add a picture or video. Change the button text if necessary.
This is a paid service. There must be money in your advertising account balance. If you don’t know, your advertising account is located at vk.com/ads
This option is suitable for those who already have a sales funnel set up. In this case, the money will be returned, or at least part of it. If you don’t sell anything, then it’s better not to even try, you’ll just waste your money.
Where to begin?
Creating a group on a social network is never limited to preparing an avatar (or cover) design and filling it with content. In order for a page to become popular and popular with visitors, it is important to find and attract an interested audience. You can do this using:
- text content;
- advertising;
- promotions and special offers;
- various media content (photos, videos).
You should start with the right page title. This will make it easier for people to find it in searches. Don't underestimate the power of keywords and phrases. Such an excellent tool as Yandex Wordstat will help you find them.
Before filling a group with content, research the needs and interests of your target audience. After this, you can start recruiting a subscription base. Anyone can independently attract the first subscribers to the VK community. This can be done for a fee or for free.
External sources
If you have your own website, YouTube channel, Instagram, telegram channel or other platforms on the Internet, then use them.
My blog has detailed instructions on how to create a website from scratch. Use it if you don't have a website. If you don’t know how to create your own channel on YouTube, then I also recommend filling this gap.
Ask your subscribers and readers from these sites to join the VK group. If you have established contact, many will join.
And also simply place a link to your VK group in the description of these sites. And from VK, put back links to the sites.
Method 1: General chat resource
They accumulate with us over time. In messengers and in VK itself. Some we enter, and some we leave. But. If the topic and content of your group coincides with the target audience of the general chat, then subscribers will come. With the right message on your part.
Yes, it looks like spam. With one difference - spam is sent to everyone, but here we select from the available general chats the most relevant to our created group.
Let's add 2 and 2. Let's say you make cool posts - not about the growing number of dumplings - the target audience reads them. What does this lead to? That's right, on to the reposts. Reposts provide coverage. And reach, in turn, leads to an increase in subscribers.
When publishing, do not forget to set the topic. What is it for? The entry appears in the thematic news feed. And experts sit there and give “+” or “-” to posts. This affects coverage. What does increased coverage lead to? Yes, that's right =)
Below: the theme “humor”, for example
What to do if there are no chats at all? Let's look below.
Services for boosting subscribers
The topic of recruiting subscribers is in great demand, so even special services have been created for this purpose.
On my blog I already told you how to get subscribers to a VK group using the BossLike service. You can get subscribers both paid and free.
- For free. First, complete the tasks yourself: join other people’s communities, like them - earn the internal currency of the service. Then spend it on buying subscribers.
- Paid. Immediately top up your balance with your money and create a task to subscribe to your group.
Of course, in this case the subscribers are either completely dead or uninterested. But for initial promotion, this is sometimes useful.
You need to understand that people earn money from these services by completing tasks. That's why they join the group and like it just for the sake of money. They will either leave your public in a few days or weeks or will simply be inactive ordinary people.
Also, non-living subscribers will be brought to you, who will eventually turn into “dogs”. These dogs need to be deleted, since the VK Administration does not like groups with unrealistic participants. As a result, your public may be blocked, and you will have to start all over again.
Therefore, treat cheating with caution; don’t cheat too much – it will backfire.
Buying a group
This is the last method I decided to consider.
You can buy a ready-made group with your subscribers. Unfortunately, I will not provide you with step-by-step instructions, since I have never bought groups on exchanges.
If you are interested, just enter the request “buy VK group” in Yandex or Google and study the offers and conditions.
