In 2016, we introduced the smart news feed and offered authors tips about how to increase their posts’ reach and improve their feedback. Last year, VK released the Suggestions section, a new service in the mobile app which offers a personalized selection of interesting content. 35% of the VK audience has already checked out the Suggestions sections and recommended posts already get more than a billion views every day.

We continue to work on the algorithms for the smart feed and the Suggestions section. We collect feedback from readers, bloggers, media and community managers, and study thousands of examples of various pages gaining popularity on the platform.

Taking into account the continuous development of our services and questions about the specifics of how they work, we’ve come up with a selection of new tips and tricks. We recommend all content creators and anyone who wants to find their own audience to check out these tips.

Stick with a style

Decide what you’re going to talk about and how. You can choose any theme: music, photography, science, art, travel, news, entertainment, etc. Develop a unique style for your writing, illustrations and the way you communicate with your readers. Remember that people will start to follow you and read your publications when your posts meet their expectations. If the theme or style is always changing, there’s a risk that you might lose your audience.

Be predictable, but in a good way. If you write about films and TV shows over the course of a year and then suddenly change course and start talking about financial evaluation, your followers could lose a lot of interest. A sudden funny GIF could temporarily attract a lot of attention, but in the long run, followers will start unsubscribing or hiding your posts from their news feed.

Choose an optimal format

Experiment and try different formats. You can make videos, publish stories, write short texts and compose full articles. You could also feature live streams and polls, or post pictures, GIFs and playlists.

With the help of VK API and community apps, the abilities of groups and public pages can expand endlessly. Group and public page managers can set up chatbots, add widgets, organize mass messaging, manage online appointments and create complex questionnaires.

Study the reaction that each post gets and evaluate the engagement by the number of interactions with the content. From time to time, repeat these experiments in search of new formats, especially when your audience is noticeably growing.

Publish unique content

Stick to posting original content. Pages that produce unique content gain popularity and greater reach. If you want to share posts or links, add your own story or insight when posting them.

Try not to create content for the sake of creating content. Write about what’s going on, and focus on the quality, not the quantity, of your posts. Try creating digests, writing reviews and making compilations. Your posts will be the reason people start following your page and recommending their friends to do the same.

Formatting is a must

Upload a distinctive cover photo and profile picture to your community and create a short address that’s easy to remember. Say a few words about yourself and your work in the page description and pin the most interesting or important post or menu at the top of the community.

First impressions are everything, so make sure to have a welcoming cover photo and an interesting post to provide users a good image of your community and content. The Suggestions service and viral mechanisms will guide a new audience to your page, but as to whether the visitors will subscribe to your posts depends solely on the quality of your posts and formatting.

Split long texts up into paragraphs. For the best reach, upload photos and videos directly to VK. Add high-quality media files with no less than 700px in width for photos and illustrations and either 720p or 1080p for videos. The VK video player supports video autoplay for high viewer involvement and offers demographic viewing statistics.

To quickly and conveniently create texts, use the article editor. Interesting articles on VK are shown in the Suggestions section giving you extra reach. If you have your own website, you should support AMP technology on it.

Create for your followers

Your first readers might be your friends and acquaintances. Let them know what awesome things await them on your page. If they like your posts, they’ll share them with their friends. When VK algorithms notice that activity and new user interest is growing, these posts will definitely end up in the Suggestions section and your followers’ personal news feeds.

Don’t disappoint your readers. They are already following your page and expecting quality posts. Firstly, the algorithms judge how interesting your posts are to followers in the news feed. Engage readers in communication. It will help make your work go viral. Enable community messaging to maintain constant communication with your readers and hear what they have to say about your work.

Encourage meaningful discussions by not disabling comments. When your friends comment on a post, that post can end up in their friends’ news feeds. The average VK user has more than 200 friends, so your post could theoretically reach 5-10 thousand people.

Cultivate loyalty

Recommend your followers to subscribe to notifications about new posts on your page so that they don’t miss any interesting news. These followers will get a special notification under the bell icon and those posts will get a higher priority in their news feeds.

Notification subscriptions will provide your community or profile with wide coverage, helping your posts go viral. You can see how many followers subscribed to notifications in your page statistics.

Keep up-to-date

Stay up-to-date with what’s hot and hype and highlight current events and themes. Determine the optimal publication frequency for your format. This frequency is different for each author. One author may write ten short posts every day while another may post a substantial article once a week. The same thing goes for readers. Some like to thoughtfully read through articles while others like to quickly flip through pictures.

The smart feed algorithms make sure that your content is seen by your followers and their friends, however the technology behind the Suggestions section is designed to go after a completely new audience which would be interested in your format. There are certain themes that follow a more specific schedule. For example, we recommend to publish news about events in the city in the evening or on the weekends and business-related content during work hours. Remember that new posts get priority.

Track your statistics

Regularly monitor the statistics of your page and posts so that it will be easier to understand what your audience prefers. Firstly, you should pay attention to the following points:

• The number of new and unsubscribed followers.
• Reactions to posts, such as the discussion in comments, the number of likes, shares and link clicks.
• Subscriptions to new-post notifications. This is the strongest indication for an author, as readers are interested in notifications primarily about anticipated and important posts.

In regards to audience growth and page development, subscription dynamics are more important than the number of post views. The number of post views reflects the growth of your audience.

You can keep track of all of these metrics in the community or profile statistics. For additional analysis, use statistics export.

Try something new

Keep up to date with new services and abilities that VK has to offer by following our official communities. We talk about the platform and algorithm updates on our VK Authors and VK Community Management pages. There, you will find examples of interesting topics and posts, more information about how the smart feed and Suggestions section work, advice for beginning authors and community owners as well as basic rules about developing pages.

Write about what you find interesting and listen to what your readers have to say.
Together, we can grow your audience and bring your works to the world.