Paid or free advertising
Targeted advertising
Targeted advertising is a “white hat” method of increasing engagement. The bottom line is that you increase the audience that will see publications or an account/public, and also interact with them (like, leave a comment or repost).
The possibilities for targeted advertising are limitless, the main thing is the budget. The more money you spend, the more engagement you get.
What affects coverage and why increase it
Let's figure out what coverage on Instagram depends on. To describe it in simple words, the more subscribers interact with your content, the more often you appear in their feed. And vice versa. Instagram statistics display 3 types of coverage: post coverage, story coverage, and account coverage as a whole.
Now more specific. The coverage is influenced by the following factors (in descending order of importance):
- saving to bookmarks;
- comments;
- reposts in stories;
- likes;
- transitions to profile.
Moreover, what is important here is not only the number of comments, likes and other actions, but also the speed of their appearance within half an hour after the content is published.
What else affects coverage:
- time of fixation of the subscriber’s attention on the post;
- Click on the “More” button to read the full text;
- scrolling through photos in the Carousel;
- viewing all your stories to the end;
- going back in history and stopping at a certain story;
- messages in Direct and much more.
Why increase coverage? Of course, to attract the target audience, which can later develop into buyers.
PR
Everything related to PR can rather be attributed to offline activities. But they are the ones that perfectly increase engagement on social networks, as there is a transition from offline to online. One example of this transition is the wooden hashtag. Clients take pictures with it and post it to their account, tagging your social networks and subscribing to them. Thus, you get new subscribers-commentators interested in your product or services.
This also includes: SMS mailings, business cards with contacts, a printed Instagram business card attached to the monitor at the checkout area, pasting mirrors and shop windows with a logo, and so on.
How to increase activity in a group
1. First of all, you need to stay active.
participants in such blocks as:
- Wall
- post interesting, unique material every day. And don’t forget that you can delay posting on VK (publishing a post after a certain time); - Group discussions -
create interesting discussions and keep them active; - Thu in the group -
add a chat so that subscribers can communicate with each other on different topics; - Polls
– Conduct group polls from time to time. This will significantly increase community activity; - Comments
- will significantly increase the activity of the group - open comments. Participants will be able to discuss posts among themselves, debate, thereby revitalizing the group and involving new members; - Competitions for a VKontakte group
are the most effective way to increase activity in the community. Hold interesting competitions and new, active subscribers will join your group.
2. Now we will look at methods of staying active
:
- Imitation of initial activity
- many people know the psychological barrier “complex of the first”. None of the participants wants to be the first to write a comment or express thoughts in discussions. It is you who must take the first step. Of course, not from an administrator account. You can ask to write a comment on your friend’s post or create a fake (second page). This step will make it clear that active communication is taking place in the group. - Unique content
- uniqueness means not only material that is rarely found anywhere. You should publish thematic posts that will be relevant in your community in order to provoke discussion among participants (if you steal content, you can grab the Nemesis algorithm in VK). - Discussions
- naturally, discussing any topic will significantly increase activity in your group. But don’t get hung up on thematic discussions. You can, for example, create entertaining discussions (games, competitions) - this will attract a lot of attention:
- Cleaning the Group
- It is very important to keep the wall, comments and discussions completely “clean”. Delete unwanted (meaningless) comments, VKontakte spam. They can ruin the authority of the group and simply scare away users. - Stories - we recommend posting your story in a group on VK. Activity will increase noticeably.
- Photo albums
- add the ability to create an album in a VKontakte group. This will significantly increase activity in the community. Subscribers will be able to add their photos and other images:
- Mutual PR
will significantly increase the activity of cooperation between VKontakte groups. Find thematic groups yourself and offer the administrator a partnership. Or make proposals for cooperation in special communities.
And also, a live cover in a group on VK will attract the attention of subscribers.
Crossing Audiences
Another interesting tool that shows the number of matching members in the two communities being compared. For example, after comparing my public page with Sergei Kopylenko’s group (we have the same topic), the service gave me the number of overlapping audiences: 100 people.
25 and 3% is the percentage of overlap between the audience from my community and Sergei’s community. Since mine is smaller, my % of intersection is correspondingly higher.
If you have not used these tools before and did not know about them, now you can use them in your work.
By the way, Publer has an affiliate program. By recommending this service, you can earn% from the purchase of paid plans of the people you invite. You can take your affiliate link and indicate your WebMoney wallet for payments in your personal profile.
Services for creating a dynamic cover
Let's highlight 5 main, frequently used services that may be useful to you for creating covers:
- Boom Cover - the main feature: the cover works without reloading the page.
- VKfiller – 16 different widgets; convenient and pleasant functionality; low price for using one cover.
- Revoc – a universal selection of 15 widgets; user-friendly interface; wide range of tariffs; availability of a free period.
- Livecoverstudio – individual design customized to your needs and interests; payment only once (per tariff) and the number of options is unlimited.
- Dynamic Cover – can create any text, date, time and even weather for you; the ability to customize the point system; aesthetic design and clear interface.
Afterword
Low activity on VKontakte is a problem for many commercial public sites, especially if their promotion on social networks starts from scratch.
When developing content, try to pay attention not only to the interests of the audience (I’m sure you will find them all), but also to the benefits of the needs: ask for help, help yourself, give useful gifts, get acquainted, etc. And in order to stir up the silent audience even more, you can use targeted mailings, which my colleague Sergey Tishin talked about.
If you have problems with activity, start creating a new content plan now. I made a template for you to make it easier to get started.
results
Over the 15 days of the competition, the following results were obtained:
Coverage
Targeted advertising per group - 3,573,008.
Targeted advertising in the application - 2,149,394.
Promoted Posts - about 20,000.
Posts on walls with pay per click - about 100,000.
Instagram - about 30,000.
Total - about 6,000,000.
Joined
VKontakte - 3,321 people.
Facebook - approximately 900 people.
Instagram - 1,000 people.
Comparison of public activity
A convenient tool that allows you to visually compare audience activity by day of the week and time in several target publics at once. Therefore, identify approximate peak matches.
To compare communities, in the “Request History” block, check the boxes that interest us, and click “Compare selected.”
We get this picture:
For convenience, each community is marked with its own color. In the comparative table we see the number of communities, the percentage of bots, the number of posts, likes, reposts, comments, the percentage of involvement, the number of posts published per day. Unfortunately, the audience percentage by gender and age is not displayed.
Next is a comparative graph of activity by day of the week. Here, we can see the coincidence of activity by day. Wednesday, Thursday, Monday, Tuesday are the days with the highest activity in all analyzed communities. Also, in 3 out of 4 communities there is quite good activity on Saturday.
In the hourly activity graph we see coincidences in time intervals: 9-10, 11-12, 16-17, 20-21.
