Which social media platforms are most effective for B2B promotion in Russia?

Social media marketing (SMM) has emerged as a prominent trend in global internet marketing, including B2B strategies. In Russia, the utilization of social networks as effective marketing tools has gained significant popularity. These platforms serve as valuable channels for engaging with target consumer audiences. By leveraging social media, companies can enhance brand visibility, foster customer loyalty, attract their desired target audience, boost sales, and accomplish other actions aimed at increasing profitability.

When it comes to promoting projects on social networks in Russia, marketers often encounter the challenge of selecting the most suitable platform. Options such as Vkontakte, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube each offer unique opportunities alongside certain limitations. Thus, determining the most convenient and beneficial social network for the B2B segment becomes crucial. While many popular networks provide professionals with distinct promotional capabilities, not all of them are equally effective in the Russian market. Let’s delve into the popular social networks in Russia and assess which ones are best suited for B2B projects.

The social media landscape in Russia

According to TNS (December 2017), Vkontakte is the leading social network in Russia, boasting an audience of 41.1 million people. It holds the second position among the most visited sites in Russia, with a user base exceeding 220 million individuals. Odnoklassniki takes the second spot with 27 million users. This Russian social network has over 210 million accounts, slightly trailing behind the popularity of Vkontakte. As of December 2017, Facebook had an audience of 21.7 million people, Moi Mir (Mail.ru) reached 9.1 million people, and Instagram attracted 16 million users. For the most recent statistics, please refer to the provided link.

In this article, our main focus is not on Russian social networks, despite their large audience base. While these networks have a significant following, we believe that international social networks are more effective for B2B sectors. Platforms like VK and Odnoklassniki are primarily geared towards entertainment, and their audience may not be prepared for business interactions. However, it is worth considering that if your budget allows it, promoting your business on VKontakte can yield positive results.

Now, let’s delve into the discussion of popular social networks in Russia within the context of marketing B2B projects. Our aim is to identify the most lucrative platforms for promoting these projects.

LinkedIn

In 2016, the social network LinkedIn was blocked in Russia due to a court ruling that found the company in violation of local data storage laws. As a result, LinkedIn cannot be utilized as an effective B2B marketing channel in Russia at present.

LinkedIn, the globally renowned business social network, is widely regarded as one of the most convenient platforms for executing marketing campaigns. With its focus on professional networking, it offers an efficient means of identifying potential B2B customers. Consequently, it’s no surprise that many international marketers considering social network promotion in Russia prioritize LinkedIn.

However, it is important to note that LinkedIn is not among the most popular platforms in the Russian-speaking internet (Runet). The platform’s Russian-speaking audience remains relatively small, barely reaching one million users, which is considerably limited in size.

Similar to other social networks, LinkedIn offers the option to set up payment for targeted advertising based on impressions or clicks. The platform provides several parameters for targeting your audience, including:

• Location: You can select countries and, in some cases, even cities. However, currently, Russia is not available as a location option.
• Company: You can target specific companies within your desired segment or choose to target the entire segment. It’s important to note that many Russian companies do not have LinkedIn pages, so you may need to focus on industry targeting instead.
• Job Title: Similar to the company targeting, you can specify a particular job title (in English) or select employees based on their functions and seniority (e.g., manager, founder, partner).
• School: If your target audience consists of university graduates, this parameter can be crucial for your targeting strategy.
• Skills
• Group
• Gender
• Age: You can select from four age groups: 18-24, 25-34, 35-54, and 54+. If your target audience is, for example, females aged 21-27, you will need to include a broader age range. While not a significant disadvantage, it is still worth considering.
• LinkedIn Audience Network: This feature ensures that your target audience will see your ad even if they have closed the LinkedIn tab but continue to browse other websites within the LinkedIn partner network.

Let’s take a look at Severstal, a Russian B2B company, and how they operate on LinkedIn. Severstal primarily focuses on the steel and mining industry in Russia, and since 2009, it has been the largest steel company in the country, according to the Metal Bulletin. The company provides basic information and shares news on its LinkedIn account, all of which is in English. This language choice makes sense as the company uses the platform to promote itself in the Western market. With over 7,600 followers, the company’s page attracts active engagement from users who frequently “like” its news updates. The content on the page is tailored to cater to LinkedIn’s user base. However, one area for improvement is the absence of videos and limited use of infographics. Including such content could generate greater interest among the audience, particularly in the “steel production” industry.

Google+

With an active audience of 540 million people, including approximately 80 million Russian speakers, Google+ stands out as a highly engaging social network, second only to Facebook.

One notable advantage of Google+ is its strong affiliation with the renowned search engine, Google, which is the second most popular search engine in Russia. Links from Google+ have a significant impact on search engine rankings, meaning that having links to Russian Google+ can enhance the visibility of your website on Russian Google search results. In this regard, you can enrich your content with various types of information, including videos. It’s worth noting that YouTube, which is operated by Google, enjoys excellent indexation, further contributing to the potential reach and influence of your content.

Google+ offers support for business pages, providing users with the ability to engage with these pages on a personal level and establish private subscriptions. Marketers, in turn, have the opportunity to foster relationships with their audience through these pages. However, targeted advertising on the social network is not available to all; it is limited to brand and company pages that meet certain criteria:

• The page must have a minimum of one thousand subscribers.
• Posts containing advertising content should be relevant to the target audience.
• The option to share gifts and bonuses must be enabled for the Google+ page.

However, Google+ does have its drawbacks. One of the main issues is the abundance of entertainment-focused content on the platform. This prevalence of non-business-related material leads many Russian users to overlook or disregard business messages, greatly diminishing its effectiveness for marketers. Furthermore, due to its historical reputation as an outsider, Google+ struggles to attract participation from business professionals. In order to address these challenges and transform into a functional business tool, Google must allocate additional resources towards its development.

Twitter

Twitter, a microblogging service, provides a convenient means of swiftly conveying crucial messages. Through this platform, users can communicate using concise messages and share links to significant webpages. While it may not be considered a comprehensive promotional platform, it excels in generating awareness and facilitates the rapid dissemination of information. As of early 2015, Twitter experienced a 13% decrease in popularity and currently holds the seventh position among the most widely used social networks in Russia. The Russian-speaking audience on Twitter amounts to 7.4 million individuals.

Regarding advertising on Twitter, advertisers have the option to target their ads based on geographic and device-specific criteria, whether it be mobile phones or PCs. Advertisers are only charged for tweets that receive retweets or comments.

It’s worth noting that Twitter is not owned by Google, which can be seen as a drawback. In many cases, content shared on Twitter tends to have a lower ranking compared to similar posts on Google+. Additionally, Twitter users in Russia have a higher tendency to disregard messages compared to users on other social networks. Unfortunately, the platform has recently been plagued by a significant influx of spam links, diminishing the value of tweets for both users and marketers.

YouTube

Video content is undoubtedly the simplest and most easily comprehensible form of content. When it comes to B2B marketing campaigns, it proves to be an incredibly effective promotional tool. Among the various video sharing services, YouTube stands out for its exceptional quality indexing and the ability to edit videos after they have been uploaded. Moreover, YouTube holds the position of the leading video hosting platform in Russia, boasting an audience of 32 million users. Notably, 60% of users who come across advertisements on YouTube continue to engage with the brand in the long term.

One of the significant advantages of YouTube is the ability to embed videos into any blog or website. As a result, you can utilize this video hosting service solely as a means of hosting videos while interacting with customers and users in other spaces such as corporate websites or social networks.

Facebook

The world’s largest social network proves to be an exceptional platform for B2C marketing, while confidence in B2B campaign success is often lacking. However, this skepticism is unfounded, as thematic groups and robust business pages make B2B marketing surprisingly straightforward and efficient on this platform. As of April 2015, statistics indicate that Facebook ranks third in popularity among social networks in Russia, with a Russian-speaking audience of 24.5 million people. Notably, there is remarkable engagement not only on personal pages, such as those belonging to deputies, but also on corporate pages of companies on Facebook.

In addition to traditional methods of conducting advertising campaigns on social networks, such as promoting publications and pages, Facebook provides advertisers with the option to promote and acquire “likes.” Depending on their objectives, advertisers can choose to pay for “likes,” impressions, or other targeted outcomes. Facebook offers various targeting options, including:

• Geography: Advertisers can specify the desired country or city for their target audience.
• Gender and age: Advertisers can narrow down their target audience based on gender and age demographics.
• Interests: Facebook offers two approaches to determine the target audience’s interests. The first option involves entering a specific topic, which prompts related suggestions. The second option requires selecting interests from a list of categories.
• Marital status: Advertisers can target individuals based on their marital status.
• Education: Targeting can be done based on the level of education of the audience.
• Place of work: Advertisers can specify the target audience based on their place of work.

Let’s take a look at the example of Rusal, a renowned Russian brand known as the world’s largest aluminum company. Rusal effectively engages with its audience through its Facebook page, showcasing captivating photo reports directly from their factories, updates from charity events, significant historical milestones in the industry, insights into the indigenous Arctic and Siberian ethnic groups’ culture, as well as stunning photographs capturing the beauty of Siberia. These materials have successfully garnered a significant number of subscribers, with the page currently having 3,235 likes. The company has also received numerous positive feedback regarding its content. While the content of Rusal’s Facebook page is well-suited for print media, it lacks certain elements tailored to the preferences of social media users. There is a lack of infographics, popular hashtags, and videos, which tend to perform exceptionally well on social networks. Although the content on the Rusal page is interesting, it struggles to generate user engagement in the form of sharing. This can be seen as a drawback of the page.

Based on the information provided, it can be concluded that Facebook is the optimal social network for B2B marketing in Russia. It offers a highly functional platform that enables the implementation of various marketing strategies and ranks third in popularity among social networks in the country. However, it is important to not overlook the importance of LinkedIn. Despite its relatively low popularity in Russia, LinkedIn, as the world’s most widely used business social network, actively competes for Russian-speaking users and is gradually gaining traction. Moreover, it is the only platform specifically focused on business promotion and establishing professional connections. Considering these factors, LinkedIn cannot be ignored.

Within the diverse landscape of social resources, Twitter and Google+ also maintain their positions as key players in the Russian market. Maintaining an active presence on these networks provides B2B companies with access to a vast audience. Additionally, using YouTube as a supplementary network resource is advisable for promotional purposes in Russia. Consequently, it is crucial to leverage all of these platforms when promoting projects. However, if time constraints are a concern, it is advisable to prioritize one or two networks.