If you live in Russia for a while, it won’t take you more than a couple of weeks to realize that Facebook and Twitter that are not the biggest social media. People actually use another platform: VK, “VKontakte”.
I personally realized this when I started to notice that I was missing out on most of the online conversations among my classmates at MGIMO, who used the platform to share notes and various communications about courses and assignments. So when I showed up for the third time in the wrong auditorya (which had been changed at the last minute once again), and asked how everyone else knew about the change, one of my Russian classmates looks at me like I’m some kind of social outcast and goes: “We posted it on VK. What, don’t you have an account?”.
With more than 350 million users (mainly Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs and others), VK’s layout and functionalities are actually very similar to Facebook: private and public messaging, pages and groups, events, image sharing, games and so on.
Still, there are some added functions too, as VK basically works as a music and video database: you can listen to literally whatever song you want straight from your page and watch tons of movies and videos!
You can join at: https://vk.com
-Paola
The Transsiberians 