The social network VKontakte has personal recommendations. This is content selected taking into account the interests of each specific user - posts, public pages, friends and music tracks. Getting into recommendations is a free way to promote on VK using social network algorithms.
In this article we will tell you how VK recommendations work and give some tips on how to get there.
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What are recommendations on VKontakte?
“Recommendations” is a section in which content that is interesting to users is shown. Usually these are posts from communities or groups themselves that a person has not yet subscribed to.
Recommended content is available in different sections - for example, in the categories of music, friends and clips. The main and most visited section is recommendations in the news feed. In the web version, you can get to them by clicking on the appropriate category to the right of the feed itself. Here you will see posts from different communities.
Click here to get into the VK recommendations
In the mobile application, you can get to the section by going to the feed and clicking on “Interesting”. The content there will be divided into categories. In the “For You” section you can see posts from friends and publications from different communities and groups. There will be publications in other sections.
The recommendations feed in the mobile application is divided into categories
There are also recommendations in many other sections of the social network. So, in “Friends” you can see in the recommendations of those who have a large number of mutual friends with you. And in “Music” there are songs similar to those that you often listen to.
There are also recommendations in the communities section
The most traffic can be obtained from the VKontakte recommendations news feed, where community posts appear. This is why many public page owners want to get there. But to do this, you need to understand the mechanics of selecting recommended content.
Recommended news on VKontakte
Where is the recommendations section located? If you go to the news feed and look at the right side of the screen, where the menu is located, you can see the “Recommendations” item there.
If we go to this section, not all records in a row will be displayed here, but only those that were selected specifically for you by a special algorithm.
How the recommendation feed is formed
How does the VKontakte website offer us interesting news? There is a complex algorithm here that analyzes who your friends and subscribers are, whose pages you view and comment on most often, as well as who you like and whose posts you repost to your wall or to your community. Based on this analysis, your preferences and interests are calculated, and exactly those posts that are most interesting to you are offered. Most often, VK guesses with advice and forwards the most interesting and relevant for you.
It often happens that you subscribe to communities, but then they become uninteresting to you, and you don’t even go there to read the new posts of the group. Gradually, there are more such communities and people on your list, and your feed becomes clogged with unnecessary information. Recommended news helps you save time and find the most interesting information.
How to manage recommendations
The “Recommendations” section has fairly simple settings. There are no menus here, but next to each photo there is an icon with three dots. If we click on it, we will see three items in the drop-down list:
- it is not interesting;
- notify about entries;
- complain.
1. How to remove recommendations from certain friends or communities? If you select the first item, a window with suggested settings will appear in place of the post. Here you can report the post, cancel the action, or select “Do not show community/user news” by clicking on the corresponding button.
How recommendations are structured, how groups and posts get there
VKontakte recommendations are controlled by artificial intelligence. It analyzes user behavior and selects content that is likely to be of interest to him. Therefore, each user has his own feed of recommended content: if you like posts about kittens, there will be photos of cats. And a friend who actively reads car care tips will see them even more.
Artificial intelligence evaluates user interest based on many parameters. For example, it takes into account:
- how long does a person spend reading the material, does he return to the paragraph above;
- does he like and write comments?
- in which groups he is active and in which he is not;
- which posts are reposted most often?
The process of how posts end up in VK recommendations is impossible to track. At the same time, algorithms are being improved all the time. Therefore, it is impossible to predict with a high degree of probability whether the content will be recommended by your target audience. “Hacking” the system will also not work.
How to get into the VKontakte recommendations feed
VKontakte supports authors of content that is interesting to users in various ways and has even created a special algorithm. This is what guarantees inclusion in the recommendations. Artificial intelligence analyzes many posts, selects the most interesting ones and marks them, their authors or the entire community with a “light”.
This is what the algorithm “light” looks like
“Ogonyok” is issued for 7 days, but you can receive it an unlimited number of times. As long as he is near the post, he will be actively promoted in the recommendations. If a community or author (person) receives a tag, their posts will also be recommended to users with similar interests.
The social network VKontakte itself has posted recommendations for obtaining Prometheus. The authors of the algorithm advise:
- Make unique content. Posts copied from other communities or user pages will not receive tags. Moreover, we are not only talking about technical uniqueness - the “light” requires “unique materials.”
- Follow the design. Content that is easy to read is more likely to get Prometheus than content that has all the text written all over it and the illustrations looking blurry and sloppy.
- Remain yourself. The authors of the algorithm recommend focusing on your creativity and not following generally accepted patterns. They directly indicate that content that is interesting to people receives the tag.
If your subscribers actively comment on posts, like them, open photos and follow links, this is a good signal for the social network algorithms. With a high degree of probability, they can recommend your content to users similar to the group's subscribers. That is, in order to increase the chances of getting into VK recommendations, you need to stimulate user activity in the community.
Speed is also important: if a post starts gaining likes and comments in the first minutes after publication, that’s good
Cheats in the form of likes and comments from bots will not help. Artificial intelligence will evaluate real user activity, and not actions performed according to given scripts. Therefore, it will be possible to get into the VKontakte recommendations only through high-quality content.
Share your experience - do you often study the VKontakte recommendations feed and then subscribe to content authors? Tell us about your experience in the comments!
How the smart feed and the recommendations section of VKontakte work
1. How do your algorithms understand that a post is interesting to a specific user? Can you list the factors that most influence the reach of a post? The quality of the content, the response from the audience - this is clear. Anything less obvious?
We analyze the user's activity in the feed and raise higher those posts with which he is more likely to interact: like, write a comment, stick, open a photo, read an article, watch a video. These actions are very different, we predict them separately. Next, all this is taken into account by a general algorithm, which, based on all factors, performs ranking.
2. At your speech at “ MEN2 ” you said that even little things such as the weather and the user’s mood affect the reach of a post. How does the tape understand this?
Behind any post there is a huge number of ranking indicators. Each component is a certain value that describes the post itself, its author, the time of day at the time of viewing the recommendations, the speed of the reader’s Internet connection and many other criteria.
If a user visited the news feed or recommendations section while in a deep forest and with a poor Internet connection, we will not show him a bulky video at the beginning of the feed. The algorithm also takes into account the day of the week and time of day. This way, the morning recommendations feed will contain more news and information content, and in the evening - media and entertainment content.
3. Do you have a document that lists all the factors that the algorithm takes into account? Or has he already become so trained that even you don’t know by what parameters he provides coverage for a particular record?
We know the list of factors, but everything is unique for each user-record pair. Therefore, just by looking at a post, it is impossible to say how good it is, it’s subjective. A post about local news from Moscow in St. Petersburg is absolutely irrelevant to me, and you may not be interested in my news feed about machine learning and social networks.
4. Is it possible to artificially increase the reach of a post by purchasing likes and shares on promotion services?
Not worth it. In the long run, this will definitely lead to lower coverage. In addition to the fact that likes and shares do not play a central role in the ranking of a post, such cheats are highly likely to be detected by us.
However, traffic to a post from references on other social networks can indeed improve the organic reach of a post, and there is no penalty for this.
5. Is there an optimal text length for maximum reach in the smart feed? For example, in the announcement of an article - no more than 500 characters. And in a longread created in the editor, there are no more than 10,000?
There is no optimal length apart from the reader's focus. Everything is based on involvement; if you have an informational message, try to write succinctly, in an information style. If you are trying to attract a person to click on a snippet, the same principle is succinct and engaging. Just don’t fall into clickbait, it will negatively affect your reach.
If you're telling a story, captivate the person. All large forms, typically more than 1,000 characters, are best typed in the article editor, breaking up the text with multimedia inserts.
6. Smart Feed favors high-quality videos (over low-quality ones). What is “high-quality video” for VKontakte? What characteristics does it have?
Videos 720–1080 rub.
7. Does VK try to detect fake news? Is the veracity and reliability of the data important, or only the audience's interest in the recording?
On VKontakte there is no pre-moderation of content - as on other platforms, users can freely publish and discuss topics that interest them. At the same time, anyone can report illegal, offensive or inaccurate content in their opinion using the “Complain” button. We consider all complaints without exception. VKontakte has one of the largest moderation services and we respond as quickly as possible.
8. How do you feel about competitions for the most active subscribers and competitions for subscription + repost? They are allowed by the VK rules, but does this somehow affect the coverage of posts (positively or negatively)? Do you recommend using competitions for promotion in VK?
This is a legal way of promotion, but you need to keep in mind that in this way you are attracting an irrelevant audience to your subscribers. This can have a negative side effect—followers who don't engage with your group's main content can have a negative impact on the reach and virality of your posts.
Promoting a community on social networks: from creating a concept to making a profit
9. Articles created in the editor receive more coverage than articles leading to a third-party site. What should commercial sites and blogs do in such conditions? How can they attract VKontakte users to their site?
A business group on any social network is first and foremost a community. If you treat it exactly like a media asset, you will succeed. Forcing a user to another site, without providing an alternative, in communication can upset a person. As they say: you want to sell me your product, but you do it without respect.
On the VK platform you can communicate with clients/readers, sell goods, receive money transfers and much more. We are developing our ecosystem and making it as convenient as possible for users. And in this regard, it is also beneficial for a business to develop its site within VK. The article editor is another tool for communication and community building.
10. Will wiki articles now receive less coverage than editor-based articles?
It's not the format that decides, but the user's interaction with your content. An interesting story told with a lot of interaction from readers will receive coverage regardless of the presentation format. Another thing is that it is more convenient to hold the audience’s attention with the tools available in the article editor.
Specifically about wiki pages, they do not fall into the “Recommendations” section on mobile devices, they are basically a desktop tool, so yes, their reach is lower than that of other delivery formats.
11. Some users complain that they do not see interesting and necessary posts. Why is this happening? And do you have any thoughts about following the Facebook path - making sure that users’ feeds contain more personal content rather than commercial ones?
We are constantly experimenting with different ranking models, and the main metric is user engagement. You can always send clear signals to the neuron by hiding a couple of posts from unwanted public pages.
12. You say that you cannot purchase bots at all. How then can the community gain its first audience? If you sign up relatives and friends, it turns out that the audience is still not the target one. And if you buy advertising, no one will subscribe to an empty community. How to find a way out?
People come to you for content. Therefore, your community will not be empty if you tell things there that are interesting to the target audience. Advertising for the target audience is an ideal option to start with. This will give you a core audience that will help you grow organically.
13. How do you understand that a penalty has been imposed on the community? How to remove it?
Looking at the statistics, this can be seen in the decreased coverage. Analyze what you have been doing in recent days, which can be regarded by the platform as unwanted actions: clickbait, aggressive audience withdrawal, unoriginal content, too frequent posting. Stop doing this. And it will go away on its own in two days 
14. Are there filters based on topic? (For example, “adult content” is downgraded). If yes, what topics have reduction coefficients?
Everything that is not prohibited by the legislation of the Russian Federation and the rules of the site is possible. Everything that is prohibited is prohibited.
15. A case from our practice. We publish unique articles on the blog every day, and they are immediately parsed by several VKontakte public pages. It turns out that they announce this content first, and we announce it 5-10 minutes later. Does this negatively impact the coverage of our posts?
Yes, ideally, you should be the first to upload content to the social network, then we will identify you as the primary source and your content will be promoted in the “Recommendations” section to new users.
16. That is, the one who first shares the link is considered the original source? If this is the case, we cannot compete with autoparsers, since they do this automatically, but with us manually, we write a unique announcement. What should we do in this case?
I didn’t share the link, but downloaded the content natively. Embeds and links, in principle, do not make you the original source of content. We don’t know what’s on someone else’s video hosting or website, and we don’t parse or analyze this content. That’s why it’s important to upload your materials to the platform’s native submission tools.
17. How will search engines index articles created using the editor? Wiki articles were well found in searches, but what will happen now?
Articles are perfectly indexed by Yandex from the very start, and by Google already too.
18. the LIVE public hosted by a VKontakte employee? Is it possible to refer to it as an official source of information?
At one's own risk. This is an unofficial community.
