What is VKontakte? Strategies to Leverage Russia's Top Social Media Platforms for Your Brand

Statistics reveal that an impressive 83% of active internet users in Russia engage with VKontakte (VK), surpassing global platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This high penetration rate offers a lucrative opportunity for businesses eyeing the Russian market, as VK provides a vast audience base and substantial traffic. Through VKontakte (VK), companies can reach a wider user base, showcase their products on the platform, establish communication channels with consumers, and increase brand awareness. Mastering VKontakte is essential for any business looking to make significant inroads into the Russian marketplace.

How to play VKontakte (VK)

• VK is a comprehensive social platform that supports music, movies, chat, short videos and multiple formats. It has comprehensive functions, but it cannot make voice and video calls.
• The core gameplay of VK is to join communities. Users can search for communities of interest or create new communities to attract partners with similar interests.
• When filling out your personal profile on VK, you can fill in your region and university information, which can help you find friends you may know more accurately.
• For cross-border e-commerce, VK is an effective and easy-to-use advertising channel, providing a powerful advertising effect evaluation tool. Merchants can expand their influence and enhance brand awareness on VK through a variety of promotion strategies.

How to create a community in VKontakte (VK)

1. Log in to your personal homepage on VKontakte, find Community-Create Community

2. Choose the purpose of creating this community. There are three options: sharing content and communication, developing business, and organizing activities. (You can choose private or public)

Sharing content and communication: more inclined to personal interests and hobbies

Develop business: promote your own products, sell them, and place advertisements

Organizing activities: This is quite special. You can choose the start and end time. It is a limited community.

3. After successfully creating the community, click [Manage]

Setting up a unique link in VKontakte

Set up an exclusive link in the basic information, and you can directly use the brand name, which will make it easier for potential customers to find your VK community. And when promoting externally, you can also directly send this link to customers, allowing them to reach your VK community more conveniently.

Open private messaging in VKontakte community

VKontakte communities are a bit like Facebook public pages, allowing users to contact each other through private messages when they are interested in community content or have questions, so VK provides an excellent opportunity for companies to communicate directly with customers.

Find [Private Message] in [Management], choose to turn on community private messages and check to add it to the left menu. Then when others enter your community homepage, they will be able to see the private message entrance in the red box above.

With the private chat entrance, users can contact you even if they don’t follow you.

How to efficiently manage incoming messages on VKontakte

When operating the VKontakte platform, users often need to not only manage the dynamics of many communities, but also handle information on multiple social media channels across platforms. This is because the marketing activities of brands and companies usually involve multiple social networks, not just VKontakte.

In order to improve efficiency and avoid frequent switching between different social media interfaces, users can consider using tools such as SaleSmartly for centralized management. SaleSmartly not only supports VKontakte, but is also compatible with mainstream international social software such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, LINE, TikTok, etc. With SaleSmartly, users can receive and reply to messages on a unified platform, simplify the social media management process, and interact and communicate with global customers more efficiently.

Further reading

How to integrate VKontakte community - SaleSmartly - Help Center - SaleSmartly User Guide

VKontakte - Wikipedia