TRENDS IN SOCIAL MEDIA
Nowadays social networking sites are gaining a lot of popularity among
youth. These have played a crucial role in reducing boundaries and
enabling them to communicate on a same platform. It has become a popular
and a potential mean for them to stay friends with the existing ones
and to grow up their social circle at least in terms of acquaintances.
Communication has become effective because of internet.
A social network is defined as a set of individuals who establish with
each other in friendship manner. The individuals and their activities in
the social network are interrelated and the bond are channels for
transfer the immaterial resources. According to Boyd and Ellison
definition of Social Network Sites, Social Network Sites is a “web-based
services that allow individuals to construct a public or semi-public
profile within a bounded system, to articulate a list of other users
with whom they share a connection, and view their list of connections
and those made by others within the system.
Social media is the collective of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration. Some of the prominent social media are Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Google+, Linkedin, Reddit.
Social network sites also introduced new ways for community formation.
although the virtual communications have existed since the beginning of
online applications, social network sites support new ways for people to
connect between themselves. Users of these sites may choose to
communicate through various digital objects, such as tagging and
in-built applications within the social network sites. Social network
sites are also not just a collection of chat rooms and forums. The users
can play games, take fun quizzes, share photos and ideas with friends.
Some of the trends and advancements in social media over the years are:
1.INTERNET PRIVACY:
Today current
trends in social networking sites are really focusing more on internet privacy.
With social networking websites like Facebook.com and MySpace.com, it is too
easy to obtain personal information about someone and use it to harm them. In a
case with MySpace.com, the availability of being able
to customize one’s own site has allowed people to use phishing html
code to create phishing profiles that allows that person to access anyone’s profile who have visited the phishing profile.
Phishing can often lead to the loss of personal information such as usernames,
credit card numbers, and passwords. This in turn causes great privacy issues
since that person can now access personal information and then sell it off
to marketing companies for a profit. This selling of information to
companies has bring to the rise in spam emails that we all received.
2.COPYRIGHTS:
Another issue of concern with social networking web sites is
the of copyright infringement. The original owner of the selected file was not
mentioned during the sharing of thousands n thousands of amount of files shared
through social networking web sites. Also, commercial products are also being
reproduced by individuals and uploaded to these social networking web sites.
YouTube is a great example of how copyright infringement can happened using a
social networking website, because the members can pretty much upload
everything on YouTube. This show us that people are doing copyright
infringement and uploading files and video clips that do not belong
to them. The only real way that copyright infringement is reported is through
the self-policing of the YouTube community. YouTube has been sued many times in
the past and is now being sued for over one billion dollars by Viacom because
of above cases.
3.INTERESTS:
The trend at the moment is that whenever you search for
content you are presented with content relevant to your interests, that is
chosen in relation to your past searches, your likes, and so on. . Users of a
social network can be associated with one or more interest categories. Posts or
updates made in the social network by friends of a first user are associated with
one or more interest categories. A social feed can be filtered based on the
interested categories or the first user of the social feed or the interests
associated with the posts or updates made by the first user’s friends. The
danger here is that this process channelled us in one particular direction
meaning that we can only see what the robots think we want to see. So we need
to make another effort to find new and different content, since it is
increasingly unlikely that this will pop up in the search engines.
4.BUSINESS:
Furthermore, business’ can use social networking websites
for their advantages. Social networking website can be used for hiring the
employees. Such sites as jobstreet actually help many people searching for jobs
and many companies looking for employees to find each other. It is as simple as
creating your own resume and upload it there. Another aspect of business
affected by social networking websites is marketing. Not only is online
advertising more effective than commercial advertising such as TV ads and
magazines, it is also more cheaper and reaches far more people
than other forms of advertising.
5. CHATBOTS:
Internet chatbots have been around for a long time. They go all the way back to the days of AOL instant messenger. But like everything else, they are evolving. Now chatbots are being integrated with social media platforms. Businesses are using chatbots to communicate with their customers on social media. This trend is growing at a rapid rate. In the first year of the new Facebook Messenger platform, we saw the number of chatbots jump from 33,000 to more than 100,000.The possibilities here are seemingly endless. Take a look at how Pizza hut uses chatbots to make it easy for customers to order food through social media:
6.SOCIAL TV:
According to a recent report from Statista,
more than 50% of digital videos are now viewed on mobile in vertical format.
This is a trend that has been moving in a consistently upward direction since
2013.
It’s this trend that influenced the
launch of Facebook Watch in 2017 and IGTV in 2018. And it’s this same trend
that will make 2019 the year of social TV. By 2021, Instagram reports that
mobile video will account for 75 of total mobile data traffic.
IGTV offers marketers a place to
share mobile first, long-form video within the Instagram platform. While it’s
still early days for this feature, brands should consider adding it to their
2019 strategy to feel the benefits of being an early adopter.
7.SEGMENTING:
CONCLUSION:
In conclusion, there is no doubt that social networking sites has great
impact on the society it has lot of challenges which we have to face
.So, we should focus on the ethical use of these social networking sites
so that it serves our society in a right way and the society can play
an important role because it is a” time bomb” for the society. In one
hand it provides a way to connect to our dear ones, and on the other
side it gives a platform that become danger to others.
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