Social networks of youth communities: content features

Social networks have become a part of our lives and young people are one of the most active groups on these platforms. The digital environment has significantly changed the format of communications, forming a different communicative culture. The authors of the article identified and studied the existing platforms for online communications: VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Telegram, YouTube, made a list of formal youth communities, defined types, selection and their formation. Youth communities were identified based on expert interviews with the school directors’ assistants on educational work, educational advisers, curators of schools and colleges. They are the Russian Movement of Children and Youth, “The Movement of the First”, the Russian public organization Russian Youth Union, Russian children’s and youth military-patriotic public movement “Yunarmiya”, Russian competition “Big break”, the Russian public movement “Volunteers of Victory”, Mosvolonter, Young inspectors of Russia. This organizations interact with schools and colleges within educational work through the social networks. The authors analyzed the statistical pages of the youth communities in the social networks, in order to identify the features of the content and activities of communities; presented a comparative table of the characteristics of youth communities in the social network “VKontakte” according to the developed criteria. In conclusion, the authors found that “VKontakte” is the most popular social network among youth organizations; messenger «Telegram», basically, completely duplicates its content; the main content reflecting the activities of offline organizations includes news about competitions, promotions, events, posts that highlighting the activity of youth organizations; quizzes and votes have the greatest response from subscribers. The results allow to make conclusions about the possibilities of using social networks in building the educational work in educational organizations.

social networks, educational work, youth communities, youth organizations, content