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The most popular social networks in Russia (Photo credit: Anna Dorozhkina 2012)
Russians have become one of the most intense and frequent users of various IT products and services in the world. This can be the reason why the time the Russian people spend on social media networks is more than twice the global average. They create communities, integrate their businesses into the social networks, send instant messages to friends and participate in discussions with peers and colleagues. What are their main preferences and concerns? What are they searching for while being on-line? You will find the answers below.
“MASMI Research Group” interviewed the Russian respondents via different Internet channels asking them several questions concerning their experience and opinions of the social networks. The research demonstrates that the most popular social networks in Russia are Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki and MoiMir, while Facebook is preferred by only 11% of respondents. It should be noted that only 1% of the Internet users don’t have their personal accounts on social networks.
Vkontakte is the current market leader in Russia. One of the main benefits for its users is the absolutely free music and video content. Everyone can easily post and share them here.
Vkontakte’s design has lots in common with Facebook. But there is a difference in the audience, which is more globally-minded on Facebook. The Russian users of Facebook usually have friends globally and travel a lot.
Odnoklassniki, meaning “schoolmates”, mostly focuses on sharing and rating photos with the minimum of background information about the user. The age profile of its audience is a bit older than on Vkontakte, and there are less students registered here.
MoiMir was founded as a part of Mail.ru platform, which is the most popular email service in Russia. Many people arrive at MoiMir as a result of their mail boxes being registered at mail.ru. As MoiMir has the common ownership with Odnoklassniki, it is predicted that the two services will be consolidated in the future.
“MASMI” also explored the main objectives of Russians on the social networks, and the results showed the following peculiarities:
- more than 50% of the active users enjoy chatting and sending instant messages to their friends via the social networks;
- 13% of people use social networks to look for their ex-colleagues, relatives and friends;
- 7-8% believe that the social networks may help them to establish new contacts and entertainment.
The intentions of the Russian social networks’ users vary:
- 8% enjoy playing on-line games;
- 7% communicate and collect different information;
- 4% follow their friends’ and relatives’ activities;
- 11 % try to find some info about the third parties they are interested in.
Another indicator that has been measured is the frequency of checking the personal accounts:
- 29 % of active users do it 2-4 times a day;
- 21% - more than 10 times a day;
- 17% check their accounts via mobile phones 1-2 times a week;
- about 6% of the respondents are on-line practically round-the-clock via their mobile gadgets.
By the way, according to the different statistics, Russians under 24 are the third-largest users of the advanced mobile devices in the world. More and more people are switching over to smart phones from the standard PCs while being on the social networks. No wonder that this social networks’ growing popularity encourages businesses to build on-line connectivity with their audience, and thousands of Western brands have already created profiles in Russia.
Anna Dorozhkina
Author: Anna Dorozhkina
