Cities’ Public Pages of the Social Network VKontakte: Features of Attracting the Audience and Presenting Information

The article analyzes the public pages of provincial cities - centers of regions, which are information resources based on user-generated content, and reveals their role and impact on public opinion in modern society. The author’s definition of the city’s public page is given; the existing typologies are considered. Also, at this stage, the content of entertainment communities was analyzed, and it was concluded that they cannot be equated with public pages with news content. Further, the author’s type-forming features of cities’ public pages were developed; various principles of informing and communicating in them were considered. In particular, there is a division into public pages of large cities, for example, Moscow, public pages of provincial centers of the regions, and public pages of small settlements. As belonging to the most numerous type, public pages of a provincial city - center of a region - were analyzed on the example of Saransk. By the method of continuous sampling, messages posted on these pages for April 2020 were considered, and a qualitative analysis of their content was carried out. Quantitative analysis (calculation of audience response rates) was made on the basis of almost 300 texts for six days in April 2020; the texts were determined by a random sample. The city’s public pages perform informative, communicative, and socially transformative functions; they unite citizens to solve problems and provoke discussion. After analyzing the audience response, the author has found out that the public page Saransk | Doska Pozora [Saransk | Board of Shame] has the highest ERday, while the number of posts per day does not exceed or is less than their number in other communities. The largest number of subscribers is in the Privet, seychas, Saransk [Hello, Now, Saransk] public, and at the same time it ranks second in terms of audience response. Posts with a positive emotional connotation prevail here, and posts always have a photo or a video. The earliest created public was Saransk | Doska Pozora. It also has features that distinguish it from the rest; therefore, it can serve as a universal model of a competitive public page in demand among the city’s audience and can perform functions of traditional sociopolitical media. Its essential difference is the efficiency of posting information on this resource. People’s news, posted in cities’ public pages, become news feeds for journalistic materials in traditional media. However, now they have simultaneously become a significant independent media resource. That is, there was a timely reorganization of the urban space, an important lacuna of which became public pages on social networks; the pages grew from primitive sizes to large public communities with a “fourth power” capable of causing a social explosion. Even without being media, they focus on engaging consumers and increasing their response due to the presented opportunity to solve everyday problems, consolidate society and administrative power to solve important social issues.

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