Review of useful SMM services. Podcasts on VKontakte How to find podcasts on VK
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 to music, but to 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 say something educational, sometimes they talk about the latest news or just joke. Unlike regular radio, you decide for yourself what you want to listen to and when.
Already now you can learn how to live with the help of podcasts " Jellyfish", listen to about gadgets and games in the community BeardyCast, get acquainted with pop culture thanks to the project Blitz and Chips or hear bold answers from stars in public podcasts inDud. Soon there will be even more of them.
How to find and listen to a podcast?
In publics that have already joined the platform, a separate “Podcasts” section has appeared. New releases can be found there. You won't miss anything: we'll send you a notification if a new podcast appears on a page you're interested in.
We made sure that you can use 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 turn it on right now.
- Don’t be afraid to take a break or change your computer to your phone - we will remember where you left off and continue the podcast from there.
- Set your own rhythm - increase and decrease the playback speed.
- Discuss specific episodes with friends - just send them a direct link to the episode.
How to add your podcast?
Publishing podcasts is as convenient as listening. And it's free. If you start posting your podcasts on VKontakte, you will gain access to a huge audience, detailed listening statistics and unique opportunities to promote your work.
You can apply to join the new podcast platform using 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: there is room for different genres, topics and formats. You will certainly find a program that will make you want to stay on the road longer. Discover this new world quickly - with the help
The social network VKontakte has opened up for Russian users access to personal data that the company collects about them and stores on its servers. An application to download the archive starting November 19 can be submitted to new section of the social network. This step was 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 has become the reason for a large number of criminal cases on extremism.
The Rosbalt correspondent took advantage of the 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's contained there.
Likes and bookmarks
An archive of data that a user can request from VKontakte comes in ZIP format. After unpacking it, the journalist received a file measuring 51 megabytes. 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 his subscriptions. There is also a “Frequently visited places” item. The social network tracks from which part of the world the user has most recently visited. 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 are in your “favorites”. Other folders contain selected articles, podcasts, recordings, videos, links, products.
The next folder is one of the most interesting. These are the likes that the user gave. The social network stores “likes” for videos, photos, notes, products and, most importantly, posts on the walls. It is this last point that is of particular interest to Russian law enforcement officers. A Rosbalt correspondent discovered that VKontakte has been storing his “likes” since 2010.
Private for intelligence services
Judging by the data upload, intelligence agencies can read all your correspondence, except those messages that have been deleted. The Rosbalt correspondent was convinced that these dialogues were not in the data set. After what time messages are deleted from the servers remains unknown.
The “other” folder contains information about users you have blocked, calls to technical support, as well as login sessions and imported contacts. The last point is interesting - in it the journalist found not only his phone and e-mail, but also the contacts of other people.
The download also contains information about your payments, including cards (the correspondent did not have this information).
Photos. The data array contains photos from different albums, including saved ones and those where you are tagged by other users. Comments left on pictures are also stored.
The archive contains all documents from your page, as well as changes in phone numbers that were linked to it.
Important update. It turned out that VKontakte even stores deleted posts from the user’s wall. This was found out by another Rosbalt correspondent who requested information about himself from the social network. On November 12, he posted text files on his page, but later deleted them. The data upload contains these records, but it is indicated that they are currently deleted.
It wasn’t the VK administration who slipped podcasts into your feed. You yourself are subscribed to a public page whose authors attach podcasts to their posts. Maybe it's an ad they got paid for. Or maybe podcast posts get more views in 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 with a podcast attached 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 is one recording, not two different ones:
Podcasts are attached to posts in the same way as music, videos, pictures, posts. You’re just not used to them yet and, perhaps, you think that VK slipped them into your feed as 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 page that you yourself have subscribed to. Look closely and you will understand.
Podcasts are sold to you in your feed by the public you subscribe to. Most likely, the authors of the public learned that posts with podcasts get more views on VK, and now attach podcasts to all their posts. They don't really care if you don't like it. After all, more views mean more money earned from advertising.
How does Smart Tape work?
Smart Feed does not show all posts from all sources you follow. Special algorithms determine what will be interesting to you. But it turns out that podcast posts have the advantage of being shown more often. Public page owners realized this and began attaching podcasts to their posts to get more views from subscribers. Just any podcasts.
How to remove podcasts from your feed?
If podcasts bother you, unfollow the group or public that publishes them, that is, he attaches it to his 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 it! You will no longer see podcasts from this public. However, there are also posts from him.
Questions? Ask the public that publishes podcasts why they do it.
You choose what you see in your feed. You subscribed to all public pages and groups yourself. You can unsubscribe from any community if you don’t like the way it publishes podcasts.
If you don’t like podcasts, unsubscribe from the public that posts them.
SMM, like any other profession, has its own working tools. Without many of them, it is basically impossible to carry out the work. They make life much easier for those who work with communities on social networks. I would like to make a short review of useful programs/utilities that are the most convenient and popular for a marketer’s work. Here I look at services that can be used to work with VKontakte and universal tools. Highly specialized services for other social networks. networks are not included in this list.
The division of services and utilities in this article was made by me in accordance with their functionality.
So, let's start with 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 by guessing on the tea leaves.
TargetHunter is a targeting service that has different tariff options, including free. It will help you find the target audience (hereinafter referred to as TA), track user activity, collect community members, work out the intersection of retargeting databases, quickly clear the databases of bots, and much more.
Unlike TargetHunter, Cerebro Target only works for money. It is one of the most popular and high-quality services.
Pepper.ninja, which quickly finds the target audience we need through competitor databases, has a short free period. It is also one of the TOP leaders among social targeting programs. networks.
The next category of services is auto-posting. For those who do not have a large budget and can limit themselves to a hundred publications per month, this 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 network accounts. Ideal for team work, as there are functions for distributing access to several employees at the same time. In it, a marketer can define a schedule and view statistics. There is a free promotional period (two weeks).
SmmBox, Megapost, Plibber are also popular.
Next is a category of utilities called bots. This also includes mailer programs. Among the most popular are Gamayun, Senler, Widget Builder, SpyCat. Making a large volume of mailings (Senler, Gamayun), setting up an automatic response for a key phrase (Red Humster), making an attractive widget (Widget Builder, SpyCat) in the community - all these are the tasks of bot programs.
Socialstats.ru, which is a free universal service for analyzing communities and personal pages on VKontakte, can help you with statistics on communities and personal messages. With its help, you can collect statistics on activity in the group, analyze the wall, photo albums and videos, as well as lists of friends, public pages and groups in which community members are members.
One should not lose sight of such an important part of SMM work as checking the uniqueness of the content and the correctness of its writing. In carrying out these tasks, you will be helped by Text.ru (a free and at the same time high-quality service), Antiplagiat (a system for detecting text borrowings), Advego (works not only with Russian texts, but also foreign ones), and the Chief Editor will check your 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 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 search for a specific word or phrase. The more often the greater the number of 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 carry out such an analysis.
In the case when you need to create a group cover, a picture for a post or an advertisement yourself, I can recommend the 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 not always necessary, especially if the SMM manager works in tandem with the designer. It’s very good if the advertising customer has his own “non-stock” high-quality photos. In this case, the advertising image will be as unique as possible.
When creating a picture, it is convenient to use various photo stocks, such as Pinterest, Pixabay or FreeStockImages. There are actually a lot of them. Another very simple way to search for images can be Yandex. Just type in words what you are looking for and a large selection of different 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 make working with groups much easier, VK Admin should be highlighted. This free application provides a wide range of features: 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 participants with uploading a list of ids; clearing a group of deleted or blocked users (dogs); tracking new comments; publication of 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 VKontakte social network. Each of you can add to this list for yourself or, on the contrary, exclude something as needed. Additional information on each service can be obtained on the official website of each of them. You should also pay attention to the tariffs, free versions, as they may change over time. The selection of a paid or free version of a program will depend on the tasks assigned and the amount of work.
You can understand which of these tools are most convenient for you only in the process of work. I sincerely hope you found this brief overview helpful.
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 the podcasts became available to all users.
After consulting with podcast authors, the developers realized that simply adapting existing audio recordings would not work. Why VKontakte became interested in podcasts, what problems it encountered in the process of creating the platform - in our special episode with Ivan Kozlov, Product Director of VKontakte.
This episode was also recorded by Lika Kremer, head of video and podcasts at Meduza, and Grigory Prorokov, author of the Blitz and Chips podcast.
Podcasts on VKontakte
Podcasts on VK are an additional type of content for communities, which occupies a separate place next to video and music. Podcasts on VKontakte are completely tied to communities: if the so-called Ivan Ivanov wants to create his own podcast, he will not be able to do this on his page - he will have to create a separate page for the podcast.
VK podcasts for authors
Now VKontakte has a little more than a hundred podcasts, which the administration of the social network selected manually. If you listen to podcasts in Russian, you will almost certainly find all the popular shows. In addition to music, they often violate copyright.
You can publish podcasts on VKontakte manually or automatically by providing the RSS feed address - the 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 old episodes, or only take 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 publishing a podcast, you can add an alternative cover to your community wall. It will be saved in the service database and will appear as a hint when publishing future issues.
You can also attach an image to your podcast post. If it duplicates the cover of an 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 upload them manually, or create a common feed and connect them to the community - with this approach, everyone who is subscribed to the group on VK will receive notifications about the release of each podcast. Not everyone is immediately interested in science, sports and technology.
VK podcasts for listeners
The VKontakte interface does not have a separate section with podcasts. To listen to your favorite audio show, you need to manually open its community and select the desired episode.
When a user plays a podcast, the player moves 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 notifications whenever a new episode is published. If desired, this setting can be disabled.
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 includes recordings from all communities that publish audio shows; There is no catalog by genre, listening rating or anything like that right now.
Conclusion
Today, VKontakte will definitely not become the new hosting where all podcasters will move, just as it will not become the new iTunes - and will not replace the application for listening to podcasts on a smartphone. But it's another entry point into podcasting for millions of people; a unique opportunity to find a new audience who have never listened to podcasts. And it should not be missed.