Vkontakte - Russian version of Facebook

When you say Vkontakte, everyone immediately thinks of the Russian version of the social network Facebook. And the truth is not too far away. It is precisely because of the absence of Russian in Facebook that this social network has been given the green light, especially in Russia. Its spread is worldwide, although the largest presence is in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Moldova.

What should you know about Vkontakte?

We need to start at the beginning, so let's imagine this social network in a bit more detail. Just like we wrote in a previous article about the social app WeChat. Vkontakte was founded in 2006 and three years later it had caught up with virtually all of its Russian competitors in terms of smaller social networks. In terms of numbers, you can take a look at the table presented below.

Subject	Value
Language availability	Approximately 80 languages
Number of users in 2009	30 million
Number of users in 2018	Over 500 million
Mobile users	77 %

The popularity of the Russian social network is still on the rise, so the number of active users is slowly increasing. From a network originally prepared for teenagers, it has spread in Russia among virtually all generations.

Comparison with American Facebook

But let's look a little more closely at the main differences between these two popular social networks. In the case of the Russian version, more emphasis is placed on monitoring inappropriate content, which can even result in a fine. The emphasis on "clean" content is certainly in Facebook's favour, whereas Vkontakte has more pirated content. If you want to log in with Facebook to various sites, you have a fairly good chance of success. With a competitor, you will only succeed this way within Runet.

Russian social network is accessible to users via mobile app, whereas Facebook offers a special Messenger dedicated to communication only. Although Facebook's security and handling of personal data is often criticised, this is nothing against Vkontakte. In the case of this social network, attacks on user accounts are much more frequent and spam is quite widespread.