In SMM, like in any other profession, there are working tools. Without many of them, work is impossible in principle. They greatly facilitate the lives of those who work with communities on social networks. 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 services. 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 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 "drain" the budget of the advertising campaign for nothing, wondering at the coffee grounds.
Targethunter - A service for targeting that has different tariff options, including free. It will help to find the target audience (hereinafter CA), track user activity, collect community members, work through the intersection of retargeting databases, quickly clear the bases of bots and much more.
Unlike TargetHunter, Cerebral Target works only for money. It is one of the most popular and high-quality services.
Pepper.ninja, which quickly finds the target CA through the competitors database, has a short free period. He 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, it’s suitable SMMplanner.
Amplifr has the ability to create a post and upload pictures. It allows you to create a project that combines several accounts of social networks. Ideal for teamwork, as there are functions for distributing access to several employees at the same time. In it, the marketer can determine the schedule and see statistics. There is a free promotional period (two weeks).
SmmBox, Megapost, Plibber are also popular.
Further, such a category of utilities as bots. Here we also include the messenger programs. Among the most popular are Gamayun, Senler, Widget Designer, SpyCat. Make a large volume of mailings (Senler, Gamayun), set up automatic response by keyword (Red Humster), make an attractive widget (Widget Designer, SpyCat) in the community - all this is all for bot programs.
Socialstats.ru, which is a free universal service for analyzing communities and personal VK pages, can help with community statistics and private messages. With it, you can collect statistics on activity in a group, analyze the wall, photo albums and videos, as well as friends lists, public pages and groups that include community members.
You should not lose sight of such an important part of SMM's work as checking the uniqueness of content and the literacy of its writing. Tekst.ru (free and at the same time high-quality service), Antiplagiat (a system for detecting textual interactions), Advego (works not only with Russian texts, but also foreign ones) will help you with these tasks. Glavred will check literacy and information style. These services are useful not only to SMM-specialists, but also to everyone who works with texts (journalists, students).
When checking the text for uniqueness for maximum reliability, you can “skip” it alternately through several services.
It is also important for the marketer to determine how often users make a request for a particular 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 this for promotional purposes. Wordstat.com will help us with this analysis.
In the case when you need to create a group cover yourself, a picture for a post or advertisement, I can recommend a very simple and at the same time quite high-quality Canva service. 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 want, as well as if you have time to create high-quality images, it makes sense to master Photoshop. This is not always necessary, especially if the SMM-box works in tandem with the designer. It’s very good if the customer of the advertisement has its “non-stock” quality photos. An advertising picture in this case 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 simple way to search for images 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 of 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. 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 exiting participants with unloading the id list; cleaning the group of deleted or blocked users (dogs); tracking new comments; publication of proposed entries at any interval.
Above me, I named and briefly described the most basic useful services that are most popular with SMM-specialists working with VKontakte social network. Each of you can supplement this list for yourself or vice versa to exclude something as necessary. Additional information on each service can be obtained on the official website of each of them. You should also pay attention to tariffs, free versions, as they can change over time. The selection, respectively, of a paid or free version of a program will depend on the tasks and the amount of work.
To understand which of these tools are most convenient for you, you can understand only in the process of work. I sincerely hope that this short review was useful 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 became available to all users.
After consulting with the authors of the podcasts, the developers realized that a simple adaptation of 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 issue with Ivan Kozlov, VKontakte product director.
This release also featured Lika Kremer, head of the video and podcast department at Meduza, and Gregory the Prophets, author of the podcast Blitz and Chips.
Podcasts on VKontakte
VK podcasts are an additional type of content for communities, which occupies a separate place next to video and music. Podcasts on VKontakte are completely community-based: if the conditional 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 on VKontakte there are a little more than a hundred podcasts that the social network administration manually selected. If you listen to podcasts in Russian, you will almost certainly find all the popular shows. In addition to music, they often violate copyrights.
You can publish podcasts on VKontakte manually or automatically by providing the address of an RSS feed - the social network will upload each episode to its server. Therefore, if the server with your podcast for some reason becomes unavailable, it will not disappear from VKontakte. When importing podcasts via RSS, the author can indicate whether the social network should download all old issues, or take only new ones. At the same time, you can enable the automatic publication of new episodes on the community wall.
When downloading podcasts manually, picking them up from VKontakte is impossible. 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 publish a podcast to a community wall, you can add an alternative cover art. It will be saved in the service database and will appear as a hint when publishing the next issues
You can also attach an image to a post with a podcast. If it duplicates the release cover, the result looks weird
Communities are limited to one podcast. Most often this is not a problem, but we have three podcasts - and we can’t publish them all in the existing VKontakte group. You will have to either upload them manually, or make a general feed and connect to the community - with this approach, everyone who is subscribed to a group in VK 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 podcast section in the VKontakte interface. To listen to your favorite audio show, you need to open his community with his hands and select the desired episode.
When a user plays a podcast, the player moves to the site header; a playlist with all podcast releases is available from this menu
When you subscribe to a community with podcasts, you will receive notifications when you publish each new release. If desired, this setting can be disabled.
The search for new podcasts takes place through a special ribbon, which is hidden in the side menu of the "News" tab. It’s called Podcasts. It automatically gets entries from all communities that publish audio shows; a catalog by genre, listening rating, or something like that is not available right now.
Conclusion
Today, VKontakte will certainly not become a new hosting, where all podcasts will move, nor will iTunes become a new one - and will not replace the application for listening to podcasts on a smartphone. But this is another entry point to podcasting for millions of people; a unique opportunity to find a new audience that has never listened to podcasts. And she must not be missed.
The VKontakte social network opened for Russian users access to personal data that the company collects and stores about them on its servers. An application for downloading the archive starting November 19 can be submitted to new social network section . This step was a response to numerous criticisms 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 of criminal cases of 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. We talk about what is contained there.
Likes and bookmarks
The archive of data that a user can request from VKontakte comes in a ZIP format. After unpacking, the journalist received a file of 51 megabytes in size. 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. Also there is an item “Frequently visited places”. The social network monitors from which point in 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 you have in your “favorites”. Other folders include featured articles, podcasts, recordings, videos, links, products.
The next folder is one of the most interesting. These are the likes that the user set. The social network stores “Like” marks for videos, photos, notes, goods and, most importantly, posts on the walls. It is the last paragraph that is particularly interested in Russian law enforcement. The correspondent of Rosbalt found that VKontakte has been keeping its “likes” since 2010.
Private for special services
Judging by the data upload, special services can read all your correspondence, except for those messages that have been deleted. The Rosbalt correspondent was convinced that these dialogs were not in the data array. After what time messages are deleted from servers, remains unknown.
The “other” folder contains information about users that you have blocked, technical support calls, as well as authorization sessions and imported contacts. The last point is curious - in it the journalist found not only his phone and e-mail, but also the contacts of other people.
The upload also has data about your payments, including cards (the correspondent did not have this information).
Photo. In the data array there are photos from different albums, including saved ones and those where you are marked by other users. The comments left to the pictures are also stored.
The archive contains all the documents from your page, as well as changes in the phone numbers that were attached to it.
Important update. It turned out that VKontakte even stores deleted records from the user's wall. This was found out by another Rosbalt correspondent who requested this information about himself from the social network. On November 12, he posted text files on his page, but later deleted them. These data are available in the data upload, but it is indicated that they are currently deleted.
It often happens that reading and watching is not very convenient: while jogging, driving or in the subway, while cleaning or walking. But at these moments you can listen - and not just music, but fascinating stories and conversations on a variety of topics.
Meet VK podcasts - a great way to get to know the 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 authors tell something informative, sometimes talk about the latest news or just joke. Unlike regular radio, you decide what you want to listen to and when.
Now you can learn how to live using podcasts " Jellyfish », Listen about gadgets and games in the community Beardycast , get to know pop culture thanks to the project Blitz and chips or hear the bold answers of stars in public podcasts in . Soon there will be more.
How to find and listen to a podcast?
In publics that have already joined the platform, a separate section "Podcasts" has appeared. New issues can be found there. You won’t miss anything: we will send a notification if a new podcast appears on the page that interests you.
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 do your own thing.
- Bookmark the issue if you cannot enable it right now.
- Do not be afraid to pause or change the computer to the phone - we will remember at what point you stopped and continue the podcast from it.
- Set your own rhythm - increase and decrease the playback speed.
- Discuss specific episodes with your friends - just send them a direct link to the release.
How to add your podcast?
Publishing podcasts is as convenient as listening to it. 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 configure the import of podcasts and share them with VK listeners.
The world of podcasts is limitless: it has a place 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 soon - with
