Humor and sport for young people, and news and healthy tips for older generations – this is what the social media preferences of Russians are.

MOSCOW, June 2, 2017. The Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) presents the results of a survey devoted to social networking preferences.

The most visited websites among those proposed to be mesured are VKontakte and Odnoklassniki:  42% of Russian Internet users surf the Vkontakte website almost every day (78% among the 18-24-year-olds; 54% among the 25-34-year-olds); 27% prefer Odnoklassniki (40% among those aged 60 and over). The total shares of respondents who use these websites are 61% and 54%, respectively.

Instagram are visited by 25%; the Facebook and Moimir pages are browsed by 20%. Twitter and Livejournal are least popular among the Russian online users (11% and 7%, respectively).

Humoristic (43%), health-related (41%) virtual communities as well as developments in the country (41%) are in high demand among users. Food and cooking (36%), home and family (33%), travelling (32%), sports (31%), science and technologies (28%) are also those topics the Internet users are keen on.

Least visited pages are pages of local, professional and education communities (15%, 14% and 14% respectively). Preferences differ across different social and demographic groups: men prefer sport (45%), cars (45%), science and technologies (43%), whereas women opt for topics such as healthy lifestyle (54%), food and recipes (52%), family and children (46%). Respondents aged 18-24 are interested in humor (49%), sport (44%), science and technologies (36%); elderly respondents browse news (62%), pages related to health (49%) and food (46%). Residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg would rather choose travelling (54%), whereas residents of small cities would like to learn the latest national news (40%).

The Medialogia Company has created a rating of the most mentioned social media networks since the beginning of 2017. Facebook is at the top of the rating (470.7 ths mentions) followed by Vkontakte (420.7 ths mentions), Twitter (349.3 ths mentions), Instagram (281.4 ths mentions) and ОК (57.4 ths mentions).

The VCIOM survey was conducted on April 20-24, in 130 settlements, 46 regions and 8 federal districts of Russia. The sample size involved 1,600 persons. The survey was conducted with multi-stage stratified sample based on general rule of walking and quotas at the final selection stage; the sample is representative of the Russian population aged 18 and over according to sex, age, education, type of settlement.  The margin of error (taking into account the design effect) with 95% confidence interval does not exceed 3.5%. The survey method is community-based structured face-to-face interviews. Apart from the margin of error, minor changes in question wording and different circumstances arising during the field work should be taken into account.

The Russian media monitoring and analysis is carried out by the Medialogia Company using the Medialogia database of 40,800 sources such as television, radio, newspaper, magazines information agencies and online media. The period of study was January – May 2017. 

Note: Using materials from the site www.wciom.ru or wciom.com, as well as distributed by VCIOM, the reference to the source (or hyperlink for the electronic media) is obligatory! The use of the Medialogia system content, fully or partially, must be accompanied by the reference to the Medialogia Company.