The social network we are talking about, and which we love so much, so far does not at all claim to be some kind of super-full-fledged music recommendation service. VKontakte is more specialized in other things. Such as convenient user communication, text entries with attachments, interesting games and applications. Nevertheless, the site has long existed a function that will allow you to find exactly the kind of music you prefer.
But not all users, unfortunately, know that such a function is provided at all! Some people do not delve into the capabilities of a particular system, site, and just use it at a basic level, so to speak. It's good that there is our website, where they will explain everything in detail to you! Today we will tell you not only how the whole system of searching for similar musical compositions works, but also how to use it correctly. Read and tell your friends about what a VKontakte music recommendation is, as well as how to find similar audio recordings among themselves.
All these songs are collected taking into account not only your VKontakte tracklist, but also taking into account the likes that you put under certain records that contained music. And it doesn't matter which song you are currently playing. Unlike the next function, where this factor is dominant.
Also, VKontakte has a function that shows the user similar audio recordings by genre and performance. How can this function be used? How does it work? Let's talk about this right now.Just play the song you like the most. Next to the title of this song, you will see a number of buttons. Among them there is a button similar to headphones, which is called "Show Similar". If you click on it, a list of songs will immediately be displayed, which, according to the administration of the VKontakte social network, is very similar to the audio recording you are listening to at the moment. With the help of this method, you can really find a lot of interesting compositions that you will like, and even them. The author of this article himself has used this opportunity more than once. The developers themselves claim that the "Show Similar" function works even slightly better than the recommendation of VKontakte music, which we talked about above.
How can the system find similar songs in real time? At the very beginning, the VKontakte system finds absolutely all of its users who have the same song in the list of audio recordings. The second step is to search for songs that are most often found with this audio recording. It is they who are ultimately displayed. In principle, everything is logical.
Thanks to the functions that are provided today in the VKontakte social network, you can always be in the search mode for new music. After all, with music it is more fun to live, work, and relax!
The social network VKontakte unites people, and various algorithms are constantly being introduced into it, so that it is more convenient for users to find their friends, relatives and just acquaintances with whom they could see several times, but when they met, they did not have time or did not want to be friends with each other ... One of the ways to quickly replenish your friends list with acquaintances is to use the Possible Friends tool on VKontakte. Within the framework of the article, we will consider the principle of operation of this algorithm, as well as how to use it.
How to see possible friends on VKontakte
To see the users whom the social network VKontakte considers to be your potential friends, just go to your page in the "Friends" section. In the lower right corner of the page that opens, under the filtering lists of current friends, there will be a block "Potential friends".
Each time you visit the page, it is rendered in a new way. This block displays 5 people you may know. If you want to see more possible friends, click in this block on the button "Show all".
After that, a page will open, which displays all users who are defined as possible friends for your page. Depending on how actively you use your VKontakte account, as well as on a number of other factors, the number of user data may vary. Scroll down the page and new prospective friends will be loaded automatically.
Please note: Despite the fact that on this page there are all kinds of filters on the top and on the right, they in no way allow you to filter the list of possible friends. That is, if you use the search from above and, for example, try to find all possible friends with the name "Sergey", the social network will simply start looking for users with the name "Sergey" in its database, not focusing on the list of possible friends selected for you.
How are possible friends of VKontakte determined?
The VKontakte company does not disclose the algorithms by which a list of possible friends is formed for each specific user. However, observations show that clearly the list of possible friends depends on:
It is important to note that there is no way for the user to see who he is listed as a prospective friend. That is, this information is not mutual for users. If you see that a VK user is displayed as a possible friend for you, for example, since you often visit his page, this does not mean that you will be displayed as a friend with him. Of course, except for the situation when, when you visit a page, you show activity on it in the form of likes, reposts, comments, and so on.
They got a new design, where there is no longer a side menu, a new section with a recommendation feed, and in the future the company is going to launch a platform for creating longreads within the social network. spent a day with the new application and talked to company representatives about how everything will work now.
In the web version of the social network, the news feed already had a "Recommendations" section, but its content was not synchronized with the search tab in the application where the new algorithm works. In addition, the content in the tab is visually grouped: photos and videos are tiled, posts with long texts take up more space and stand out.
From about half of the posts, you can immediately tell how they got into the recommendations - mainly due to the fact that they were liked or commented on by friends. The other half gets in an unknown way: the algorithm in the top of recommendations showed me an unfunny (although kind of humorous) video of an unknown girl with 43 views and one like, not even from a friend.
There are also many short text entries in the feed, sometimes there are publications of celebrities with verified profiles (I had Ruslan Sokolovsky and Ilya Varlamov). In general, recommendations leave the impression of a more convenient tool for consuming content than a news feed or video section. Due to the removed interface elements, which are not necessary in this case, the content came out ahead and became more neat. By clicking on the card, you can go to the entry itself - the entire familiar interface and a button for a quick subscription will be available there.
VKontakte calls its algorithm “Prometheus” (in ancient Greek myths, he brought fire to people): when a user's post gets into recommendations, he gets a tag in the form of a flame on his page. So it will be possible to understand where the stream of new comments and likes came from.
But not only Prometheus works in the recommendation feed, looking for something new and supporting little-known bloggers. There are two more types of selected content: the first is personal recommendations based on the user's social graph, and the second is the trends common to VKontakte.
Representatives of VKontakte said that Prometheus is able to search for users similar to others. If the social network knows that the artist Duran is popular among users, it will use the data collected about their interests to look for bloggers like him.
At the same time, the company promises that it will fight plagiarists who do not produce their own content, but earn popularity by stealing it from others. The algorithm will look for the original and try to show it exactly, and we are talking about all media - text, pictures and video, explains Sergey Paranko, who develops the media platform of the social network: “If someone took someone else's content and started to climb it, then we will always check - and whether this content has been previously uploaded by someone. "
Cosmetics
In early September, the leading designer of VKontakte Pavel Knyazev announced an imminent redesign of mobile applications. In the current form of the application, only half of what was promised has been implemented: the likes have become red (they look much juicier, it is more pleasant to press), the buttons have become rounder, many icons have been redrawn, and, most importantly, the application no longer has a side menu - there are only five buttons at the bottom.
Visually, this is unusual: the sections of the side menu are now located under the fifth button, and music and video are hidden there too: when listening to music, you will have to return to this particular tab to switch tracks. The design of the audio player is still the same, and in the video section there are still no recommendations that appeared on the desktop back in 2015 - now all recommendations are only in the search tab.
The news feed is very similar to a combination of Facebook and Instagram: on the one hand, there is a variety of "heavy" content, the delivery of which is controlled by an algorithm. On the other hand, there are stories and quick access to their creation by swiping to the right. But now VKontakte has not one, but already two algorithmic feeds in adjacent tabs: news and recommendations.
It sounds difficult, especially since the mobile version does not imply full synchronization with the desktop - neither in working methods, nor in visual design. VKontakte managing director Andrey Rogozov explains: the web has long gone by the wayside, ahead are mobile platforms, and user patterns on them are very different.
Longread platform
So far, VKontakte has only the old possibilities for creating records - writing text posts, taking photos, videos and stories with masks. But by the end of 2017, the social network promises to launch a platform for creating longreads that will "display correctly on all devices."
Paranko explained that the platform for longreads is essentially an editor for long posts with various attachments, which will allow publishing complex formats within the social network. Previously, VKontakte publics used wiki markup for this, but it will most likely become a thing of the past - it will not be turned off, but will not be developed. According to the description, the platform will resemble what Medium, Facebook and Telegram already have.
Medium has a directory of interesting articles, Facebook has a richer text layout tool, and Telegram has a primitive editor for publishing any large materials with support for fast loading via Instant View. VKontakte declares that they will support the AMP initiative (this standard is used by Google and Twitter) for faster loading of their materials, including those embedded in external sites.
According to the idea of the company, for the user, reading external materials and published through the platform should not be any different - moreover, the "smart" feed will rank such posts higher than regular links, since the content will load faster for the user. According to VKontakte statistics, 85% of users switched to the smart feed during the year the smart feed was in operation.
How correct the display will be on all devices is still a question. A few years ago, within the framework of a similar initiative for media in VKontakte, large cards appeared at links to media materials and other external sites - however, the social network application for iPad still does not know how to display them correctly.
Built-in messenger
Back in August 2014, representatives of VKontakte during a special event announced plans to release a separate messenger for messaging. These plans were repeated many times by media sources until the end of 2016, until the question "When will VKontakte release the messenger" finally became a meme.
Informally, representatives of the social network have long recognized that the need for a separate messenger has disappeared. Now this is enshrined in the company's official press releases: it began to separately count the audience of the "built-in VKontakte messenger" - according to the latest data, this is 82 million people a month. The social network is used by 97 million people every day.
The benefits of the VKontakte smart feed
According to the official statement of representatives of the social network VKontakte, the majority of users independently switched to the smart feed. Among the users there are those who simply did not turn it off. Also, according to the above statistics, the coverage of records increased by more than 20% on average, and the number of targeted actions increased by 50%.
The old-style ribbon is still available to users. As before, it includes publications from friends and subscriptions in chronological order. When you create a VKontakte account, the smart feed is enabled by default. You can disable it in the "News" section by deactivating the "Interesting first" button.
The VK smart feed algorithm is interesting, first of all, to those users who are subscribed to a large number of groups and pages. Now they do not need to look through the entire chronology of publications in order to find the most interesting news and posts for themselves - it is enough to enable the button "Interesting first", and the algorithm will display the information that corresponds to the interests of the user. By the way, it is this fact that is the reason that the ratio of "Like" marks has increased by 50% since the activation of the smart feed.
It is worth noting that the algorithm collects and analyzes the behavior of users of the social network all the time: it takes into account not only comments and “Like” marks, but also hundreds of other factors, most of which are not disclosed by the VKontakte administration. Among the famous are:
Since everyone's interests are different, the smart feed builds content on an individual basis, and it improves over time thanks to a self-learning algorithm. In this regard, the owners of VK groups and communities need to know how the smart VK feed works and how it can be used to maximize the reach of the target audience and increase loyalty to content.
How smart feed VKontakte works
For users of the social network, work with the algorithm is limited to pressing the on / off button of the smart feed. The owners and administrators of VKontakte groups, on the contrary, in order to popularize their resource and raise its rating, should take care that the published content, be it photos, articles, audio or video recordings, gets into the ranking and is offered in the feed as the most interesting material.
The main thing that group administrators should know is how to prepare and design a publication so that it is suitable for getting into the smart VK feed. First of all, you need to pay attention to the content itself. In particular, it must be unique, that is, it must be published for the first time, without any borrowing (even its own, previously published materials will be recognized by the algorithm as copied). It is not known to what extent the uniqueness of the content is taken into account, however, representatives of the network state that original posts are shown much more often than duplicate material. Among the equally important conditions for the preparation of content are:
- Publication format. Highlighted short and long materials, with the presence of audio and video materials, photographs, links, documents, etc. The bottom line is that a person will be shown mainly what they most often pay attention to. For example, if he most often reacts to various selections of photographs of cats, similar material will always be in priority until the algorithm notices any changes and reacts to them; conversely, if a person prefers long posts, they will be shown more often.
- High visual quality of posts. Photos and images with poor resolution (less than 700px) do not rank or rank poorly in smart feed. Also with the video. This is done to ensure that the user has the most aesthetic in the feed.
- The ability to comment on records. User feedback is a sign of interest. If the comments are closed, the post is much less likely to reach the top positions in the rankings. If the administrator is worried about the presence of obscene language and insults in the comments under the posts, they can be easily suppressed using filters.
- Number of entries per day. This is bad news for those who publish a lot of material every day: the priority of the smart feed is infrequent, but high-quality posts. Conversely, the more activity on the group wall, the less audience coverage will be in the end. The recommended frequency of posting is no more than one post within 3-4 hours.
In addition to complying with these conditions when compiling and publishing content, community administrators must carefully monitor and analyze statistics, observe user reactions to different types of publication formats and build strategies in such a way that the proposed material satisfies not only the preferences of the audience, but also corresponds to the parameters of the algorithm. Taken together, this will lead to the fact that the news feed of each user will become more interesting and attractive, which means that VKontakte, firstly, will improve its position and will be able to attract much more business investment in advertising; second, it will force authors to take the interests of subscribers more seriously.
How to get into the smart feed on VKontakte
As noted above, a smart feed is an algorithm created specifically to form a more interesting user news feed. The hierarchy of posts here, in contrast to the standard chronological order, depends on the degree of usefulness of the published material and its ability to interest the user.
In addition, recommended posts sometimes appear in a person's feed, which, according to the algorithm, may be of interest. This assumption is made, of course, on the basis of previously collected and analyzed data. Moreover, such posts can be published in a community to which the person is not subscribed. In other words, the algorithm generates a semblance of personal search results within a social network. In this regard, the tasks of group administrators wishing to get into the smart feed should be aimed at improving the quality of content:
- First, the posts should be higher than the posts of other groups.
- Secondly, so that not only subscribers, but also random people interested in a similar topic, can receive the group's notes as recommendations.
Collectively, these actions benefit the community statistics by increasing the reach of views and subscribers.
The main factors of getting into the VK smart feed
Above, we have described the factors that allow you to display group records in the smart tape. However, the fulfillment of these conditions does not give a 100% guarantee of success. The behavior of the target audience also plays an important role here. In particular, this includes the following parameters:
It is worth noting that these factors operate for a limited amount of time: the more a post collects user reactions within a day after publication, the more likely it will be in the smart feed. In other words, a record that is a month or even three days old, even if it suddenly begins to gain popularity, will not qualify for ranking by the algorithm.
Among the typical posts that, according to statistics, are most often found in the smart feed, one can mark posts with text and attached video material (one or more), text with a poll or vote, a selection of pictures and photos in high resolution, etc.
Recently, VKontakte has the ability to write articles using an internal editor. According to popular belief, text materials intended for long-term reading take priority in the ranking of the smart feed. This assumption is due to the fact that large articles are most often found in recommendations, increasing the natural increase not only in the reach of the target audience, but also in the group's subscribers.
Smart feed on Instagram
The introduction of a smart feed in Instagram is due to the fact that the application was bought out by the largest social network Facebook, where for many years it has been ranking news feeds by the degree of interest in posts from users. In other words, Instagram now only shows content that gets the most audience engagement. As a result of the innovations, not only the ranking conditions have changed, but also the overall level of subscriber engagement - many popular accounts have noticeably decreased reach.
The principle of forming a smart feed on Instagram is as follows: the algorithm, based on the individual characteristics of the user's account, selects the most interesting material. In particular, it takes into account: user activity (likes, comments), real geographic location, etc. Several users can be subscribed to the same profiles, however, the chronology of displaying posts will be different for each of them: one person will have a photo in priority and rank higher than that of another user.
When posting a photo on Instagram, the algorithm shows it to a small part of followers (about 10-20%). If the audience's response is high, the photo will move to even greater coverage and, having passed the "exam", will move on. Due to this, profiles with winding subscribers (not showing activity) lose popularity and audience coverage.
Probably many of us have noticed the VKontakte tab "Potential Friends", but not everyone knows what it is for and how it works. This is what will be discussed in this article.
Let's take a look at what the tab looks like "Potential Friends", perhaps someone did not notice her.
And how many of those who know about it have guessed how this function works, and by what principle it defines people with whom we may be familiar? Everything is very simple. Let's open this section and study it in more detail. Having done this, you will notice that most of the people who are there are those with whom we communicated, but did not add as friends, or we have mutual friends with them. Now it's a little clearer how this function works, but that's not all.
First, this list is formed based on the people with whom you have mutual friends. Further, this is a whole chain. Those users who have the same city as yours, the same job and other factors are searched for. That is, it is a clever algorithm that constantly updates your list of possible friends. Let's say you added someone as a friend and immediately, from the list of his friends, there will be those who have common friends with you, and they will be offered to you as your possible acquaintances. Here is the whole principle of the section. "Potential Friends".
Of course, it is impossible to obtain accurate and reliable information. Only the developers of the VKontakte website know this. It can be assumed that VK collects anonymized data that is tied to an identifier, or buys it from other networks. But this is only a guess and do not be afraid, your personal data is not collected.
Conclusion
We hope you now understand how this function works. With the help of it, you will find your old acquaintances or even get to know people from your city, educational institution.
