I mentioned in one of my previous posts that in 2009 Russia was announced the world’s most engaged social networking audience (ComScore report). And even though I am a bit skeptical about all the social media buzz these days, I felt like I had to describe the Russian social networks.

While I mentioned Twitter in Russia a number of times in my other posts, I practically ignored the biggest Russian social marketing channel. And even though Twitter is a hot trend these days, and it’s grown up to 183.000 users during the winter, Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki is the place where most of your potential customers are.

Here is the distribution of the audience among the biggest social networks in Russia:

Below I provide a short description of 3 most important Russian networks in comparison with known .COM networks.

Vkontakte.ru

Vkontakte.ru (“In touch” or “keeping contact” in Russian) is the biggest social network in Russia. It looks pretty much like Facebook, although with less functionality. Some people even say that Vkontakte copied FB and that FB tried to sue Vkontakte.. I haven’t come across any official information, but still.. looking at it one can hardly deny the resemblance…

Front page of the Russian social network Vkontakte

Just like Facebook, Vkontakte users can create profiles with their content, connect with friends, create and join groups. Groups have more or less the same functionality as FB groups, i.e. publish links, posts, videos and photos on the wall.

Just as FB group pages, Vkontakte group pages can be programmed, rebuilt and optimized. With a good knowledge of Vkontakte internal programming language one can develop subpages and navigation menus, add banners and links to external websites etc. All in all, Vkontakte group can look rather proper.
Vkontakte also has similar to Facebook advertisement program with similar targeting options.

Odnoklassniki.ru

Odnoklassniki.ru (means “classmates” in Russian) is a popular social media platform where people search for their classmates, colleagues and university friends. The search is organized by Name, Location, University / school name, Year of graduation, Place and year or army service etc.

Every person signing up creates a profile and can connect with friends, publish photos, update status and join groups. Neither profiles nor group pages are public (i.e. are not open for search engines). There is no such thing as a fan page. There is no possibility to search for groups.

Front page of the Russian social network Odnoklassniki.ru

Odnoklassniki has become a very spammy platform. I personally deleted my profile due to enormous amount of phishy links and sexually related messages coming into my inbox. It was annoying and I left There are of course possibilities for paid advertisement like banners etc. provided by Odnoklassniki itself.

Moikrug.ru

Moikrug.ru (”My circle” in Russian) is some kind of imitation of Linkedin, i.e. a business network, where people connect with their business contacts. Job search function is quite popular there as well.

Front page of the Russian social network Moikrug.ru

Moikrug is owned by Yandex.

Apart from personal profiles and networking, Moikrug also allows to create groups and discussions, like on LinkedIn.

Privet.ru

I have not looked into this so much, but it looks like a social network with various hosting possibilities, such as blogs, video and audio hosting etc. I will try to research more and write a post about this in the coming months.

Facebook in Russian

Facebook is rapidly growing in Russia and I believe will be big at some point. All the functionalitis are the same as for other languages.

As I wrote earlier, my company made me the chosen one (i.e. chosen to attend a Russian Pubcon - Optimization.ru conference in Moscow).

To be honest, I was a bit disappointed. Most of the sessions were way too basic for any half-way experienced SEO person, and generally the conference seemed very commercial.

Anyways, I managed to learn some lessons, and here they are:

1.    Soon webmasters will be able to edit snippets shown in the SERPs. There is a chance META description will replace today’s random snippets of text.

2.    Widgets for Yandex can be a good source of traffic (it is possible to create widgets for Yandex, just the same way as for iGoogle)

Alexandr Sadovsky

3.    Yandex finally created Webmaster Guidelines (similar to Google’s guidelines). Sadovskiy (Director of search = Matt Cuts of Yandex) joked that the guidelines are for white SEO and that webmasters should try to be at least somewhere in between

4.    Yandex knows that up to 90% of all links to Russian sites are bought. Sadovskiy publically announced that buying links is BAD!

5.    One guy said that Russians are more technical that analytical. Many people use Yandex Webmaster panel, but not many use analytics packages. Besides, 54% of of clients of SEO companies look at rankings only to evaluate success of the SEO campaign, and only 22% try to connect it with sales.

6.    Liveinternet statistics is extremely useful for keyword research

7.    Social media is developing. SMO is a trendy topic in Russian Internet circles.

8.    Webmasters are mainly happy about the new Yandex search algorithm Snezhinsk. There was very little said about it though..

9.    Russian SEOs try to use statistics and math to analyze search engine algorithms and PPC bids. They like long fancy formulas. Very scientific society.

10.    Radisson SAS Slavtanskaya in Moscow is not a good hotel. At all!

Yandex endorse microblogging. Yandex loves Twitter. But do you know how big Twitter is in Russia? Social marketers have created a lot of buzz around Twitter this year, and perhaps, rightly so. But entering Russian market and setting up you online marketing strategy, always remember: Russian Internet sphere is a) unique, b) not as developed as the Western Internet sphere, c) likes local products and services. So Twitter works for you in the US? This is how things are in Russia:

Worldwide Twitter has over 50 000 000 users, which produce 4 000 000 tweets every day. In Russia they’ve got only 76 000 Twitter users and approximately 50 000 tweets per day.

So what is the future of Twitter in Russia? Is it coming? Is it gonna become the place to be, search, communicate? Hmm.. Hard to say. It’s grown 10 times in 2009, but it is still very small. According to the Yandex’s rating of popular microblogs, the main action is happening at blogs@mail.ru and micorblogs on QIP.ru

Yandex also made a statement about Twitter: Twitter’s audience consists of geeks. Come to Twitter if you need exactly these people and you have something to tell them.

=)

I came back from my vacation just a couple of days ago and WOW, what do I see?! Yandex released some services for microblogging! So Russians go social [media]!

First, Russia was announced to be world’s most engaged social networking audience (according to comScore, July 2), now this.

In my previous post about social media in Russia I mentioned that Twitter was not that popular.. Well, seems like it might have a bright future in my motherland after all (half motherland, anyway..)!

So, that is what Yandex has released:

Advanced Blog Search now supports search in microblogs

To select this option and try yet another search engine (this time Russian), go to http://blogs.yandex.ru/advanced.xml and select Search in Microblogs:

How to do Twitter search on Yandex

Did not work for me today as the service was temporary unavailable, but I believe normally it works just fine  =)

Please note, that this search engines goes not only through Twitter, but also through blogs.mail.ru, mblogi.qip.ru, my.ya.ru, juick.com, ljchat.ru, jamango.ru, friendfeed.com, smster.ru and smsnik.com.

Rating of microblogs
Here they list the most popular Twitter users. The first column is Yandex rating, the second – number of followers. Today I saw there were 38 541 Twitter accounts in the rating. Will check in a week and update you on progress =)

Yandex is now on Twitter!
http://twitter.com/yandex – here. I’ve been following it for a while and can’t say Yandex is extremely active. However they post some good links every now and then.
NB! Tweetdeck seems to have problems with displaying Cyrillic characters =( That’s too bad. I love Tweetdeck.

Yandex can read, understand, search and index shortened URLs

…such as , tinyurl.com, bit.ly, clck.ru or twtr.ru (there are even local Russian URL shortening services). I will write a separate post about it.

Cool stuff! =)

Earlier this week one of my Twitter friends posted a link to an article about Russian Internet marketing and social media, which, in my opinion, is a great summary of what is happening in online marketing field in that huge country.

This post is more or less a summary with my personal comments.

So here are the 8 things listed:

1. Social networks are huge in Russia, however they are not the networks we are used to. Russians prefer their local social networking sites such as Odnoklassniki.ru (very spammy and extremely commercial in my opinion, but still widely used..even my mum has an account)  and Vkontakte.ru (which is literally a clone of Facebook). Facebook’s market share is growing since they introduced Russian interface, however is still unbelievably small.
2. Yandex is a “Google-killer” as I noted in my first post. One can’t say better!
3. The region of Moscow accounts the majority of Russian Internet users. Moscow is definitely the city with the highest Internet usage and the highest number of people who have fast Internet connection. You would be surprised how many households across the country still have dial up modems (for some of my clients it is about 40-50% of all visitors!)!
   A conclusion: dealing with regional SERPs on Yandex, be careful to not get assigned to any small region. Otherwise you will be invisible in Moscow SERPs and lose lots of traffic potential.
4. There is no Twitter boom in Russia whatsoever. This is very important to keep in mind when developing your Russian Internet marketing strategy! Go for social networks and forget about Twitter for now.
5. Mobile marketing is growing more and more popular. Not everyone has a fast internet, but everyone has a mobile phone (sometimes more than one). This marketing channel is developing rather quickly.
   Last week Begun (context advertising network of Rambler) launched mobile targeting. Now advertisers can configure the ads for specific mobile operators (MTS, BeeLine, Megafon, Sky link – the most popular ones – and also some smaller regional operators) and the most popular mobile devices (Symbian, iPhone и Windows Mobile).
   According to Begun about 15 million ads are shown every day on mobile devices, and the number keeps growing.
6. “Russia is more than one market”. The country is huge! People are different. Do not expect the same response to your ads in all regions. People in Moscow are somewhat more “European” and differ a lot from people in Vladivostok by culture, language, habits and ways of thinking. Decide on your target audience, try and analyze!
7. Alexandr Medvedev (Russian president) has a video blog (on LiveJounal). Not sure how this can be useful, but it’s funny =)
8. Advertising is still growing, developing, becoming more sophisticated. The importance of PR (public relations, not page rank, obviously) is growing as well. And brands matter!

Russia is a very specific market, and any marketing strategy has to be carefully thought through.