The social network "VKontakte" opened for Russian users access to personal data that the company collects about them and stores on its servers. An application for downloading the archive starting from November 19 can be submitted to new section of the social network. This step became a response to numerous criticism of the social network, which provides personal data of its users at the request of Russian law enforcement officers - this was the reason for a large number criminal cases of extremism.

The Rosbalt correspondent took advantage of new opportunity and requested information about himself as soon as the social network opened access to this service. An hour later the archive was ready. Let's talk about what is contained there.

Likes and bookmarks

The archive of data that a user can request from VKontakte comes in ZIP format. After unpacking it, the journalist received a 51 megabyte file. A large number of folders appeared on the screen: applications, audio, bookmarks, likes, photos, videos, and so on.

The first folder, ads, contains the user's interests based on their subscriptions. Also there is an item "Frequently visited places". The social network tracks from where in the world to recent times most often the user came in. In the case of the Rosbalt correspondent, the geotag was determined quite accurately.

With applications and audio recordings, everything is more or less clear.

Another folder is bookmarks. It contains information about whose pages you have in your "favorites". Other folders contain featured articles, podcasts, recordings, videos, links, products.

The next folder is one of the most interesting. These are the likes that the user has put. The social network stores “Like” marks for videos, photos, notes, merchandise, and most importantly, posts on the walls. It is the last point that Russian law enforcement officers are especially interested in. The Rosbalt correspondent discovered that VKontakte has been keeping his likes since 2010.

Private for special services

Judging by the uploading of data, the special services can read all your correspondence, except for those messages that have been deleted. The Rosbalt correspondent made sure that these dialogues are not in the data set. How long it takes for messages to be deleted from servers remains unknown.

The "other" folder contains information about users blocked by you, calls to technical support, as well as authorization sessions and imported contacts. The last point is curious - in it the journalist found not only his phone number and e-mail, but also the contacts of other people.

The upload also contains data about your payments, including cards (the correspondent did not have this information).

Photo. The data array contains photos from different albums, including those saved and those where you have been tagged by other users. The comments left to the pictures are also stored.

The archive contains all documents from your page, as well as changes in phone numbers who were attached to her.

Important update... It turned out that VKontakte even stores deleted entries from the user's wall. This was found out by another Rosbalt correspondent, who requested information about himself from a social network. On November 12, he posted on his page text files but later deleted them. These records are present in the data upload, but it is indicated that in currently they are removed.

It's not the VK administration that slipped you podcasts into the feed. You yourself are subscribed to the public, the authors of which attach podcasts to their posts. Maybe this is the ad they got paid for. Or maybe podcast posts get more views on the Smart Feed. Now let's figure out how to remove them.

Why do I have podcasts in my feed?

Look, here's a post that has a podcast attached to it at the bottom. Do you see the like and repost icons below, as well as the beginning of the comments? All this together with the podcast - one entry, not two different ones:

Podcasts are attached to posts in the same way as music, videos, pictures, posts. It's just that you are not yet used to them and, perhaps, you think that VK slipped them into your feed, like an advertisement. But in fact, this was done by the authors of the public themselves, who attached the podcast to the recording.

A podcast is a part of a post (an attachment to it) from a public, to which you yourself subscribed. Look closely and you will understand.

The public you are subscribed to sells podcasts to you in the feed. Most likely, the authors of the public learned that podcast posts get more views on VK, and now they attach podcasts to all their posts. They don't really care if you don't like it. After all, more views means more money earned from advertising.

How does smart tape work?

Smart Feed does not show all posts from all sources to which you are subscribed. Special algorithms determine what will be of interest to you. But it turns out that podcast posts have the advantage of showing more often. Public owners realized this and began to attach podcasts to their posts in order to get more views from subscribers. Just any podcasts.

How do I remove podcasts from the feed?

If podcasts get in your way unsubscribe from the group or public that publishes them, that is, it attaches to its posts. Example: in the picture above, you need to click on the name "Dumb public" to go to the public page, and then click "Unsubscribe" or Leave the group. That's all! You will not see any more podcasts from this public. However, and posts from him too.

Questions? Ask the public that publishes the podcasts why they do it.

You choose what you see in the feed. You subscribed to all publics and groups yourself. You can unsubscribe from any community if you don't like that it publishes podcasts.

Do not like podcasts - unsubscribe from the public that posts them.

It often happens that reading and watching is not very convenient: while jogging, driving or on the subway, while cleaning or walking. But at these moments you can listen - and not only music, but fascinating stories and conversations on a variety of topics.

Meet VKontakte podcasts - a great way to meet authors and discover something new every day.

What is a podcast?

Podcasts are audio blogs and programs that you can listen to whenever you want. Sometimes the authors tell something informative, sometimes they talk about the latest news or just joke. Unlike conventional radio, you decide what you want to listen to and when.

Now you can learn how to live with the help of podcasts " Jellyfish», Listen about gadgets and games in the community BeardyCast, get to know pop culture through the project Blitz and Chips or hear bold responses from the stars in public podcasts vDud... There will be more of them soon.

How do I find and listen to a podcast?

In publics that have already joined the platform, a separate section "Podcasts" has appeared. New releases can be found there. Don't miss a thing: we'll send you a notification when a new podcast appears on a page of interest.

We made sure that you can enjoy podcasts with maximum comfort.

• Feel free to lose track of time - listen to programs in the background and go about your business.
• Bookmark the episode if you can't book it right now.
• Don't be afraid to pause or switch your computer to your phone - we'll remember where you left off and continue the podcast from there.
• Set your own rhythm - increase and decrease the playback speed.
• Talk to your friends about specific episodes - just send them a direct link to the episode.

How do I add my podcast?

Publishing podcasts is as easy as listening. And it's free. If you start posting your podcasts on VKontakte, you will get access to a huge audience, detailed listening statistics and unique opportunities to promote your creativity.

You can apply to join the new podcast platform at this link: vk.me/podcasters. If you already have an audio blog on another platform, you can easily set up the import of podcasts and share them with VKontakte listeners.

The world of podcasts is limitless, with room for different genres, themes and formats. You will certainly find a program for which you want to stay longer on the road. Discover this new world sooner - with the help

SMM, like any other profession, has its own working tools. In principle, it is impossible to carry out work without many of them. They make life much easier for those who work with communities on social media. I want to make a small overview of useful programs / utilities that are the most convenient and popular for the work of a marketer. Here I consider services that can be used to work with VKontakte and universal tools. Highly specialized services for other social. networks are not included in this list.

The separation of services and utilities in this article was made by me in accordance with their functionality.

So, let's start with the parsers, whose task is to collect the target audience. These are targeting programs that no SMM specialist can do without, unless he is going to "waste" the advertising campaign budget in vain, guessing on the coffee grounds.

TargetHunter Is a targeting service that has different tariff options, including a free one. It will help you find the target audience (hereinafter referred to as the target audience), track user activity, gather community members, work out the intersection of retargeting bases, quickly clear the bases of bots, and much more.

Unlike TargetHunter, Cerebro Target only works for money. It is one of the most popular and quality services.

Pepper.ninja, which quickly finds the target audience we need through the bases of competitors, has a short free period. It is also one of the TOP leaders among social targeting programs. networks.

Next category services - auto-posting... For those who do not have a large budget and can limit themselves to a hundred publications per month, it is suitable SMMplanner.

Amplifr has the ability to create a post and upload an image. It allows you to create a project that combines several social media accounts. Ideal for teamwork, since there are functions of distributing access to several employees at the same time. In it, a marketer can set a schedule and view statistics. There is a free promotional period (two weeks).

SmmBox, Megapost, Plibber are also popular.

Further, such a category of utilities as bots. This also includes mailer programs. Among the most popular are Gamayun, Senler, Widget Builder, SpyCat. Make a large volume of mailings (Senler, Gamayun), set up an automatic response for a key phrase (Red Humster), make an attractive widget (Widget Constructor, SpyCat) in the community - all these are all the tasks of bot programs.

Socialstats.ru, which is free, can help with statistics of communities and private messages. one-stop service to analyze communities and personal VKontakte pages. With it, you can collect statistics on group activity, analyze the wall, photo albums and videos, as well as friends lists, public pages and the groups that community members are members of.

One should not overlook such an important part of SMM work as checking the uniqueness of content and literacy of its writing. Text.ru (free and at the same time high-quality service), Antiplagiat (a system for detecting textual interrelationships), Advego (works not only with Russian texts, but also foreign ones) will help you in carrying out these tasks, Glavred will check the literacy and information style. These services are useful not only for SMM specialists, but also for everyone who works with texts (journalists, students).

When checking the text for uniqueness, for maximum reliability, you can "pass" it one by one through several services.
It is also important for a marketer to determine how often users make a request for a specific word or phrase. The more often large quantity requests for a particular topic, the more popular it is. So it makes sense to use it for advertising purposes. Wordstat.com will help us to carry out such an analysis.

In the case when you need to create your own group cover, picture for a post or advertisement, I can recommend a very simple and at the same time quite high-quality service Canva. There is a free version of this program, if you wish, you can switch to the paid version at any time, there is a promotional period of 30 days.

Alternatively, you can work with Crello.com, Pablo.buffer.com, New Picture.plus. And of course, if you wish, and also if you have time to create high-quality images, it makes sense to master Photoshop. This is far from always necessary, especially if the SMM-specialist works in tandem with a designer. It is very good if the advertising customer has his own “non-stock” high-quality photos. In this case, the advertising picture will be as unique as possible.

When creating a picture, it is convenient to use various photo stocks such as Pinterest, Pixabay or FreeStockImages. In fact, there are a lot of them. Another very in a simple way image search can be Yandex. It is enough to type in words what you are looking for, and a large selection of various images will appear.

When saving the necessary information, it is convenient to use the helpers Joxi.ru (creating and saving screenshots) and Ru.saveform.net (downloading videos, music, pictures).

Among the applications that greatly facilitate the work with groups, VK Admin should be highlighted. it free app provides a wide range of possibilities: instant notification of all events in the group; accepting and sending messages on behalf of the community; viewing statistics of any community for a selected period of time; saving groups and publics for quick access; instant tracking of new and exited members with unloading of the id list; cleaning the group from deleted or blocked users (dogs); tracking new comments; posting suggested entries at any interval.

Above, I have named and briefly described the most basic useful services that are most popular among SMM specialists working with the social network VKontakte. Each of you can supplement this list for yourself or, on the contrary, exclude something as needed. Additional information for each service can be obtained on the official website of each of them. You should also pay attention to tariffs, free versions, as they may change over time. Selection, respectively, paid or free version any program will depend on the tasks set and the amount of work.

To understand which of these tools are most convenient for you can only be understood in the process of work. I sincerely hope that this short review was helpful to you.

In May of this year, VKontakte announced the launch of a podcast platform. It took more than three months - closed testing for authors began on September 12, and today podcasts are available to all users.

After consulting with the podcast authors, the developers realized that simply adapting existing audio recordings would not work. Why did VKontakte become interested in podcasts, what problems it faced in the process of creating the platform - in our special issue with Ivan Kozlov, Product Director of VKontakte.

Lika Kremer, head of the video and podcast department at Meduza, and Grigory Prorokov, author of the Blitz and Chips podcast, also contributed to the recording of this episode.

Podcasts on VKontakte

Podcasts on VK are an additional type of content for communities that occupies a separate place next to video and music. Podcasts on VKontakte are completely tied to communities: if the conventional Ivan Ivanov wants to create his own podcast, he will not be able to do it on his page - he will have to create a separate page for the podcast.

VK Podcasts for Authors

Now there are a little more than a hundred podcasts on VKontakte, which were manually selected by the administration of the social network. If you listen to podcasts in Russian, you will almost certainly find all the popular shows. In addition to musical ones, they often violate copyright.

You can publish podcasts on VKontakte manually or automatically by providing the address of the RSS feed - social network will upload each episode to its server. Therefore, if the server with your podcast becomes unavailable for some reason, it will not disappear from VKontakte. When importing podcasts via RSS, the author can specify whether the social network should download all the old episodes, or only the new ones. At the same time, you can enable automatic publication of new episodes on the community wall

When downloading podcasts manually, it is impossible to pick them up from VKontakte. The developers promised to add in the next updates the function of creating an RSS feed, which can then be given to third-party aggregators.

When you post a podcast to your community wall, you can add an alternate cover art. It will be saved in the service database and will appear as a tooltip when publishing the next issues.

You can also attach an image to your podcast post. If it duplicates the cover of the issue, the result looks strange.

Communities are limited to one podcast. Most often this is not a problem, but we have three podcasts - and we cannot publish them all to the existing VKontakte group. You will either have to download them manually, or create a general feed and connect to the community - with this approach, everyone who subscribes to the VK group will receive notifications about the release of each podcast. Not everyone is immediately interested in science, sports and technology.

VK podcasts for listeners

There is no separate section with podcasts in the VKontakte interface. To listen to your favorite audio show, you need to open its community with your hands and select the desired episode.

When a user plays a podcast, the player is moved to the site header; a playlist with all episodes of the podcast is available from this menu

When you subscribe to a podcast community, you will receive a notification every time a new episode is published. This setting can be disabled if desired.

The search for new podcasts occurs through a special feed, which is hidden in the side menu of the "News" tab. It's called Podcasts. It automatically contains records from all communities that publish audio shows; there is no catalog by genre, rating of listening or something similar now.

Conclusion

Today, VKontakte will definitely not become a new hosting, where all podcasters will move, as it will not. new iTunes- and will not replace an application for listening to podcasts on a smartphone. But this is another entry point into podcasting for millions of people; unique opportunity find a new audience that has never listened to podcasts. And it must not be missed.