What Social Network will Perform the Best for Game Marketing in Russia?

Promoting a game, changing perception of a brand, strengthening the game’s hand among a more active audience or telling new users about a new product—these and many other marketing tasks can be resolved by social media.

Choosing Social Media

If your marketing budget is sufficient to maintain advertising campaigns in all social media, this sounds like a plan to cover a larger target audience. But what is to be done if you need to choose one or two key social media and progress there?

To answer this question, you will need to understand where the largest share of your target audience ‘dwells’.

Vk.com

Monthly audience is 73 million people. The main share of the audience consists of men and women aged 25-34.

Source: Mediascope, June 2020, Russia

Instagram

58 million Russians use this app monthly, with the basis consisting of women that prevail in all age groups.

Source: Mediascope, June 2020, Russia

Odnoklassniki.ru

This is another popular social media site, which basis is the very Russian-speaking audience. More than 48 million Russians check their accounts on Odnoklassniki monthly. Notably, unlike two previous social media, this one is noted for its audience, which is more mature.

Source: Mediascope, June 2020, Russia

Facebook

Facebook, a popular social network in the Western world, is not the same success in Russia. Its monthly reach of users is almost twice as small as VKontakte.

Source: Mediascope, June 2020, Russia

Creating a Game Community

An official social media account is sort of an official voice of your game. Its main advantage is that you can maintain a dialogue with users and not only tell about your game, but also get gamers’ reviews and other feedback.

Why is it better than a blog or a website? Simple as that—people, including gamers, are lazy and have no time at all to look for your website or read FAQ to find an answer to their question, while the official game account is where they spend a lot of time—in social media. What is more, news, updates, and discount info appear in their feed themselves. By doing so, the interaction process becomes easier, faster, more relaxed and reciprocal, thus, more effective. In view of this, involvement into your product grows deeper.

This is how you can create a full-value social media community about your game where you set your communication rules, but it is in a ‘natural habitat’ of your users and a constant reminder. While you are the one who sets the rules, the official account can exercise those functions that are of maximum use for you.

To promote games in the Russian market, we recommend creating game communities in three social media: VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, and Facebook.

Social Media Advertising

In our article Tips for Marketing Video Games Across Social Media in Russia, we detailed how to find gamers in social media and what advertising formats must be included into the marketing strategy for game promotion.

Let’s focus on key features of ads placement in VKontakte, the most popular social network in Russia.

There are two different advertising activities available on VKontakte: targeted ads and community ads.

Community ads let you place your news in the feed of the groups chosen.

What you should take into account when working with this format is thinking up why a person should move to your group. Are you holding a contest for a subscription? Do you promise to tell more about the game? May he or she appreciate your dripping copywriting from the first sight and want to read you more often?

An advertising post is your small text accompanied with an image/GIF/video, and it must grab a future player at once.

Choosing communities, never look at the number of followers. The number of post views and ER is what must get to your head. It does not matter if there are formally 10,000 or 500,000 people in the community—what matters is how many of them will really see you post. By the way, same deals with your community, do not forget to monitor your audience engagement!

Besides, while choosing communities, select their theme thoroughly. It is unlikely worth advertising a new indie platformer in a Dota 2 community and, on the contrary, a tactical shooter will unlikely get a positive response in a group devoted to games by Tale of Tales.

Parsers will help you look for communities with your target audience. To work in VKontakte, take full advantage of Cerebro Target. Parsers let you gather audiences by key words in page descriptions and by groups, find audience crossings, and download the audiences gathered and filtered into your advertising account. Therefore, you will manage to show your ads to followers of certain communities.

Offline Events Leaving for Social Media?

The 2020 pandemic changes game promotion conditions—now core marketing budgets of game brands are reassigned from offline to online. Even such large game industry events as Comic Con Russia and IgroMir will go online this year. In this regard, what becomes essential is promotion in key online channels, one of which is social media.

This year, online broadcasts of ComicCon Russia and IgroMir can be watched on VKontakte social network. During the streams, viewers will be granted with exclusive materials from new movies and games, new comics. Besides, it is expected that there will be a prize drawing and the first interactive cosplay contest. The events will take place in October, that is why game developers need to make sure even now that their brand is at least presented on VKontakte. This will let potential partners and Russian gamers learn more about the game without leaving the event broadcast platform.

What is more, Russian gamers greeted this news with enthusiasm because they used to have to go to Moscow in order to attend the event, but now Comic Con Russia and IgroMir 2020 will be available absolutely for all comers.

Source: Kanobu.ru

Assessing the Prospects

Social media can be both a core and an auxiliary tool to promote your game in the Russian market. Experts of RMAA Games will help you assess the prospects of promotion of a video game in social media and choose optimal platforms for placement.

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