Effective ways to fill a VKontakte group with people and content

The VKontakte group allows you to unite a large number of users based on interests.

This is a tool with which you can sell products, popularize ideas and lifestyles, and also share your own creativity if you are an aspiring writer, musician, hair stylist, etc.

You can even make money by placing advertising posts if you gather many “live” participants in the community.

Find out how to make a VK group popular and attract the maximum number of users.

How to promote a group on VK yourself

Promoting a VKontakte group has one nice feature:

At first you worry about how to promote the group, you get the first thousand subscribers, two, five, ten, and somewhere after twenty thousand there comes a turning point. Organic growth begins, and the administrator has to respond to user comments, cope with the flow of spam, and even change the vector of development of the community.

But in order to achieve this indicator, and for the group to grow independently after that, it is necessary to do everything right from the very beginning.

How to choose a group name

There is an easy way to regularly attract new subscribers: add a keyword to the group name.

This will save you from having to spend time thinking about the best name; you will not have to check whether a similar trademark has already been registered:

• “Ossetian pies, homemade pastries from St. Petersburg” - what could be more understandable? A user who wants to buy a homemade pie in St. Petersburg will definitely join this group and become a potential buyer.
• “Women's Club │ Weight Loss ● Diet Recipes” - from the name alone it is clear that the group is intended for women who want to lose weight and are interested in dietary recipes.

It is important to understand that by naming groups in this way, administrators are focusing primarily not on users, but on Vkontakte’s search algorithms. The social network displays in search results those groups that have key queries in their names.

What keywords to use in the title and how to find them

[google_other] The best, and also free, service for searching keywords is Yandex.WordStat.

The main window of the Yandex.Wordstat service with an example of selecting a group name for the mid-frequency query “Realtor Moscow”, which has a total frequency of 574 impressions per month

But, before using it, you need to describe your group in a few words, determine what its main key query is. Spam in names is not allowed, because the name is the calling card of the group.

When choosing a keyword, you should give preference to high-frequency queries.

Content

An example of content that is not entirely thematic, but suitable for an online store, diluting the main selling publications of the public, and gaining the trust of users
“Content is king,” say foreign marketers. And this is actually true! Without high-quality and regular publications, using the best services for increasing VKontakte subscribers will not give any results.

There are several points to pay attention to:

1. Thematic content . If your group is about cooking, you should not publish personal information from the life of the administrator, or encourage users to discuss political events. The more thematic content is published, the greater the involvement of each individual user.
2. Posting frequency . VKontakte groups, from the point of view of a proper break between publications, are something between YouTube and Instagram. It’s hardly worth publishing dozens of messages every day, but one piece of news a week is not enough.
3. Compliance of the publication with the age indicators of the audience . If you have a business-themed group, you should not use youth slang and quote performers popular among schoolchildren. On the other hand, publications in a group where students are members are unlikely to be overly encyclopedic.

Decor

An example of the corporate style of one of the VK groups, developed by a design studio.
Look at the most popular VK groups and you will probably like their unique design.

It is better to entrust visual design to freelancers. In general, for five thousand rubles you can get a design of excellent quality.

You should pay attention to the following elements:

• Group cover design;
• Menu item design;
• Regular graphic design of publications.

The first points require one-time involvement of designers. Publishing content requires constant work in Photoshop. No special skills are required, but the process is time-consuming. Administrators of large public sites hire managers to manage the group, which will require monthly expenses of 10-30 thousand rubles.

Performers can be found on popular remote work exchanges, the best of them:

1. fl.ru,
2. freelansim.ru,
3. weblancer.net

Post layout plan

In order for people to stay in the group and read its posts, you must post them periodically and evenly. That is, you don’t need to post 20 posts at once once a month; hardly anyone will read them. But if you post three to four posts a week, then most of the group’s subscribers will probably read them. There is no need to constantly spam: people get bored with it and they unsubscribe. Uniform, interesting and timely posts are the best option for any commercial group.

Attention:

a lot depends on the topic of the group. If this is a city portal, then it is more correct to post a large number of news posts in it. If this is a commercial group, then 3-4 posts per week will be enough.

Another tip for those who want to gain a large number of followers: use hashtags. Hashtags are keywords that are written with #. For example, if the post is about choosing a kitchen, then you can use #furniture, #kitchens, #choice, #chipboard, #wood, etc. Information is searched for on these tags on social networks, so people who entered them in the search will come to you in group to the specified post. Additionally, we recommend making back contact with the audience. Conduct various surveys, organize competitions, respond to comments, etc. The more active people are, the livelier your group is.

On VKontakte you can set up targeted advertising

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).

Choosing a name

Many people call groups some impersonal words or just a set of letters, but this is fundamentally wrong. The name should reflect the meaning of the group or emphasize its focus. There are two ways to go here:

1. Call it by the name of the company to carry out additional marketing promotion of the brand. For example, “Cilicia” or “Rud”.
2. Give the group a name related to its activities. For example, “Nikita Furniture Store” or “Affordable Belarusian Cosmetics”. Upon entering the group, a person will immediately understand what it is dedicated to.

We recommend choosing the second option also because it contains keywords that are indexed by search engines. This means that if a person enters “Belarusian cosmetics” into Google or Yandex, he will end up in your group. These are free visitors who may well become regular subscribers and clients, so take advantage of this opportunity.

Promoting VK using paid promotion

There are special communities on VKontakte, whose members will provide advice and also offer their services in promoting your group:

• Promotion of groups - the group regularly publishes useful information on how to optimize a page and how to attract the attention of readers. For paid consultations, you can contact the administrator.
• MUTUAL PR | GROUPS PROMOTION – this community is intended for meeting public owners and providing mutual assistance. You can publish a link to your group for free, but to secure it you will have to fork out 50 rubles.

Paid services usually require money and time. The timing of advertising campaigns is discussed individually, but most often ranges from 1 week. In fact, representatives of paid services use the same tools that are available to everyone. On average, if you work independently, you can spend about three times less money. The remaining two-thirds usually pay extra for professionalism and experience. Quite justified.

Where to go for quality content

A completely reasonable question arises: who should fill the group according to all the described criteria? After all, its owner does not necessarily do this personally, but has the right to attract outside help. Moreover, many processes are labor-intensive in themselves and require certain qualifications. So here are the main options:

1. Contact the services of professional authors (copywriters, rewriters). They create their own texts or present in other words articles already available on the Internet. The result is a new, unique publication, and it can also be supplemented with pictures on the topic. It is best if, as a result, you are presented with a work based on a serious analysis and the use of several source materials.

2. Simple copy-paste, or copying content from other sources. Not very desirable because it violates copyright laws. And search engines can “ban” your group or rank it so low that in terms of content a new member is unlikely to ever get to your page.

3. A high-quality translation from a foreign language is a completely legal way to obtain existing information, bypassing search robots. It is necessary either to have such knowledge yourself, or to use an online translator service, and then give the text to be proofread by one of your friends with in-depth knowledge of foreign languages.

4. Another option is called synonymization. For this, there are special applications that select words that are similar in meaning, but differ in sound and spelling. However, search engines often recognize such creations, after which an inevitable “blacklist” follows.

Using friends

Let's look at another simple and free way to attract people to a group on VKontakte: simply invite people to your place. The social network constantly changes the possible number of applications sent out per day, but in general it is quite possible to fill 10–20 people per day. There is another option - the group is created as an ordinary person, and not as a community, after which you simply send out invitations to everyone. We recommend choosing people based on their interests and not sending invitations to popular users: gather your audience starting from the very bottom. When you have 1000 subscribers, others will follow you simply because you are popular. The operating principle is as follows:

1. You have created a group and started promoting it.
2. You have created a profile for an ordinary person and invite friends to it.
3. You make the last post an advertisement, with an invitation to join an interesting group.
4. Some of your friends flow into it.
5. You visit people and like their posts (not your friends). They see the activity, go to your profile and like back, including the post with advertising. Partially they subscribe to your group, partially they repost your posts, attracting their subscribers.

Attention:

You should not add too many participants as friends, as the social network considers this spam or cheating. Study the current rules so that your group does not get banned.

Why are subscribers needed?

First of all, it is worth saying that VKontakte has subscribers to personal pages, as well as public pages. In the first case, the number of subscribers indicates how popular and authoritative a public figure is to others. A user whose personal page has many subscribers often feels more confident and can engage in blogging activities. However, this article will focus specifically on subscribers of public pages or groups.

Subscribers play a very important role for the community. VKontakte groups are often created to earn additional income. The most popular reasons for creating and promoting groups are the following:

• promoting your own brand and business;
• provision of advertising services (in this case, advertisers provide materials for advertising, and you receive a monetary reward);
• making money from affiliate programs (this option involves advertising any projects or sites for making money, services or goods, etc.).

In order for any of the above options to generate the desired income, you need to start promoting the VKontakte public. Indicators of subscriber activity are likes, reposts and views of posts. This is why it is important that the number of community members be large.

In addition, many users subscribe only to developed and promoted groups with an audience of thousands. Therefore, at the initial stage it is almost always necessary to attract a sufficient number of subscribers. These people will view published materials, like, repost, leave comments and perform other actions necessary for promotion.