StudyQA — VKontakte for business: what’s new in 2017

vkontakte for business 2017

VKontakte is indeed the main social network in Russia: 97 million people use it every month with overall country population being 144 million. So whatever marketing strategy universities employ for reaching potential students in Russia, they are using VKontakte and its business accounts. This article aims at giving universities the overview of this year updates that can come handy in their work.

For those searching for the new content forms

  1. For those universities that organize meetings for potential students or participate in education fairs, a new application was introduced. “Events schedule” (Расписание мероприятий in Russian) allows creating a list of events where the university is present. The group followers can subscribe to receive a reminder about these events, so it is sure that they show up.
  2. For involving potential students more and learning more about their needs, the inquiry form (Форма сбора заявок in Russian) was introduced. It is a customized form that can be used for gathering registrations for events, newsletters and materials for FAQ about university section.

For those looking for more touch points

  1. This year VKontakte has added a possibility to do mailing inside the social network. The followers can subscribe to receive regular information from the community in form of a private message. This is done through the application “Mailing” (Рассылки сообщений in Russian). Such new functionality opens big opportunities for the universities working with potential students: they can send deadline notifications, program updates, and targeted communications regularly. This also increases reach compared to the simple feed posting – not all the users see the posts on feed, but most are likely to check their private messages.
  2. VKontakte is now employing the Streaming API technology that allows the keywords tracking. The universities subscribe to receive notifications of crucial keywords and system detects them, a notification with link is sent to the university. This technology allows always being in time for resolving questions from a potential student.

For those working on targeting

  1. VKontakte has introduced the app retargeting feature this year. The retargeting can be done in two ways. First, by simply adding a retargeting pixel to the app. Second, by uploading in the audience the ID Apple (IDFA) and Android (GAID) databases. Now universities that have applications can retarget potential students that have visited certain sections of the app and engage them on otehr touch points.
  2. The targeting precision for mobile phone owners was also improved: targeting can be done now for three different types of iPhone and Android phones depending on their price segment.

For those constantly improving ad strategy

  1. Those universities that produce video advertising can now participate in a program of rewarded videos that are integrated into games in the social network. The system is based on the following principle: the advertiser enters into reward network and requests to integrate the video ad into a game. This ad then is shown to the players during the game and they get game points for watching it. The points rewarding approach ensures that the videos are really viewed and thus increases the reach for the advertiser. 
  2. For ads, new evaluation system was introduced. For all the ads published after the 23rd of October, publishers see the evaluation based on the viewers’ reactions. For the universities, this is a tool that gives directions in understanding if they are approaching the potential students in the right way or not.