Facebook and VK: which social network to choose for student recruitment?

Facebook or VK?

VK.com and Facebook are two the most popular social networks in Russia among students and high-school graduates. They are intensively used in recruitment campaigns by both international and domestic universities. However, Facebook and VK.com have different types of users and sometimes it's more efficient to focus on one social network only, while attracting students to you university.

VK.com has about 60 million visitors every month and more than 60% of them are younger than 25 years old. Facebook's typical visitor is older: only 45% of its 24 millions of users are younger than 25. This difference may be crucial for universities: while potential Master's students may be found on Facebook, it is wiser to use VK.com while looking for high-school students for Bachelor's programs. It also should be noted that almost all Russian students are VK.com users, while Facebook is rather popular among those who live in big cities (Moscow, St Petersburg) and study at leading universities.

Universities could use different type of advertising in both social networks. On VK.com you could use targeted advertising, advertise you public page directly or to start a partnership with exisitng groups or public pages. Facebook does not endorse commercial arrangements among users and advertisers. However, this social network has more instruments to analyze the efficiency of your advertisements using statistics provided by Facebook. Generally, targeted advertising on VK.com is slightly cheaper, than on Facebook, which could be additional argument to chose Russian social network.

As a result, the choice of social network depend on your aims. In most cases the most profitable strategy would be to use both VK.com and Facebook, while MBA programs would be significantly more interesting for Facebook audience and Bachelor's programs do not interest those who use Facebook. In general, the choice between these two social networks may be based on following criteria:

Price: VK.com is slightly cheaper than Facebook, but the latter provide more instruments to analyze the efficiency of targeted advertising

Audience: Facebook's audience is older and wealthier, while most high school students are mostly present on VK.com