We present some examples of locally conformal symplectic structures of the first kind on compact nilmanifolds which do not admit Vaisman metrics. One of these examples does not admit locally conformal K"ahler metrics and all the structures come from left-invariant locally conformal symplectic structures on the corresponding nilpotent Lie groups. Under certain topological restrictions related with the compactness of the canonical foliation, we prove a structure theorem for locally conformal symplectic manifolds of the first kind. In the non compact case, we show that they are the product of a real line with a compact contact manifold and, in the compact case, we obtain that they are mapping tori of compact contact manifolds by strict contact...