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Social Networks

Rachel A. Stuart, M.A.*

*PhD Candidate in the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University (Pullman, Washington)

Imagine you have thrown caution to the wind. You have decided to take the year off and take the road trip of your dreams. How do you let your friends and family know that you did not, in fact, get murdered when your van/house broke down in the middle of northern New Hampshire only to be towed by a convicted attempted murderer? Why with social media of course! You live stream the whole ordeal via Periscope and then tweet a quick line afterward to let the people you know and love that you are alive and okay while simultaneously using the Facebook page of a local mechanic to make sure you can get fixed and on the road in a hurry. Trying to get a job so you are not homeless when you come home from the road? A quick check every day with your connections on LinkedIn will do the trick! The role of social media has come to permeate almost every aspect of both our online and real world experiences. Even with so much exposure, there is still some confusion as to what constitutes a social networking site (SNS), and which of the literally millions of web pages on the Internet can be considered SNSs.

What is an SNS? According to boyd and Ellison (2008), there are three criteria that a website must meet to be considered an SNS. A website must allow users to “(1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system” (boyd & Ellison, 2008, p. 211). These guidelines may seem to restrict what can be considered an SNS; however, there are still literally hundreds of vastly diverse websites that are functioning as such. Social networking sites have seemingly permanently cemented their place in the landscape of the Internet, and as we become comfortable explorers of the online social world, the nuances between social networking and social media become clearer and more defined. For over a decade, the terms social media and social networking sites have been used almost interchangeably. However, as the sites and apps dedicated to creating connections to people become more nuanced, there does seem to be a differentiation between the two. According to an article published by Social Media Today, social media are forms of “…electronic communication (as Web sites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (as videos)” (Schauer, 2015, par. 3), whereas, social networking sites are dedicated to “…the creation and maintenance of personal and business relationships… online” (Schauer, 2015, par. 4).

One way to think about the difference between social networking sites and social media is to think about how the Internet and the World Wide Web are delineated: If you are on the world wide web, then you are on the Internet, but just because you are on the Internet does not necessarily mean you are on the web. The same is true for social media versus social networking sites; if you are on a social networking site, you are on a form of social media, but just because you are on social media, does not mean you are on a social networking site. As the social media and social networking sites become more nuanced and comprehensive, the distinction between them will become ever more blurred. Rather than looking toward the future at this point, let’s take a look at the background and history of social media and SNSs.

Background

Social media sites have taken on many forms during their evolution. Social networking on the Internet can trace its roots back to listservs such as CompuServe, BBS, and AOL, where people would converge to share computer files and ideas (Nickson, 2009). CompuServe was started in 1969 by Jeff Wilkins, who wanted to help streamline his father-in-law’s insurance business (Banks, 2007).

During the 1960s, computers were still prohibitively expensive; so many small, private businesses could not afford a computer of their own. During that time, it was common practice to “timeshare” computers with other companies (Banks, 2007). Timesharing, in this sense, meant that there was one central computer that allowed several different companies to share access in order to remotely use it for general computing purposes. Wilkins saw the potential in this market, and with the help of two college friends, talked the board of directors at his father-in-law’s insurance company into buying a computer for timesharing purposes. With this first computer, Wilkins and his two partners, Alexander Trevor and John Goltz, started up CompuServe Networks, Inc. By taking the basic concept of timesharing already in place and improving upon it, Wilkins, Trevor, and Goltz created the first centralized site for computer networking and sharing. In 1977, as home computers started to become popular, Wilkins started designing an application that would connect those home computers to the centralized CompuServe computer. The home computer owner could use the central computer for access, for storage and—most importantly—for “person-to-person communications—both public and private” (Banks, 2007).

Another two decades would go by before the first identifiable SNS would appear on the Internet. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, there were several different bulletin board systems (BBSs) and sites including America Online (AOL) that provided convergence points for people to meet and share online. In 1996, the first “identifiable” SNS was created—SixDegrees.com (boyd & Ellison, 2008) SixDegrees was originally based upon the concept that no two people are separated by more than six degrees of separation. The concept of the website was fairly simple—sign up, provide some personal background, and supply the email addresses of ten friends, family, or colleagues. Each person had his or her own profile, could search for friends, and for the friends of friends (Caslon Analytics, 2006). It was completely free and relatively easy to use. SixDegrees shut down in 2001 after the dot com bubble popped. What was left in its wake, however, was the beginning of SNSs as they are known today. There have been literally hundreds of different SNSs that have sprung from the footprints of SixDegrees. In the decade following the demise of SixDegrees, SNSs such as Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter have become Internet zeitgeists.

Friendster was created in 2002 by a former Netscape engineer, Jonathan Abrams (Milian, 2009). The website was designed for people to create pro-files that included personal information—everything from gender to birth date to favorite foods—and the ability to connect with friends that they might not otherwise be able to connect to easily. The original design of Friendster was fresh and innovative, and personal privacy was an important consideration. In order to add someone as a Friendster contact, the friend requester needed to know either the last name or the e-mail address of the requested. It was Abrams’ original intention to have a website that hosted pages for close friends and family to be able to connect, not as a virtual popularity contest to see who could get the most “Friendsters” (Milian, 2009).

Shortly after the debut of Friendster, a new SNS hit the Internet, MySpace. From its inception by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe in 2003, MySpace was markedly different from Friendster. While Friendster focused on making and maintaining connections with people who already knew each other, MySpace was busy turning the online social networking phenomenon into a multimedia experience. It was the first SNS to allow members to customize their profiles using HyperText Markup Language (HTML). So, instead of having “cookie-cutter” profiles like Friendster offered, MySpace users could completely adapt their profiles to their own tastes, right down to the font of the page and music playing in the background. As Nickson (2009) stated, “it looked and felt hipper than the major competitor Friendster right from the start, and it conducted a campaign of sorts in the early days to show alienated Friendster users just what they were missing” (par. 15). This competition signaled trouble for Friendster, which was slow to adapt to this new form of social networking. A stroke of good fortune for MySpace also came in the form of rumors being spread that Friendster was going to start charging fees for its services. In 2005, with 22 million users, MySpace was sold to News Corp. for $580 million (BusinessWeek, 2005); News Corp. later sold it for only $35 million. MySpace, now with approximately 50 million active monthly users, has since been toppled as the number one SNS by Facebook, which had over 1.59 billion active monthly users worldwide in early 2016 (Shields, 2015; Facebook Company Info, 2016).

From its humble roots as a way for Harvard students to stay connected to one another, Facebook has come a long way. Facebook was created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with the help of Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin (News Room Factsheet, 2016). Originally, Facebook was only open to Harvard students; however, by the end of the year, it had expanded to Yale University, Columbia University, and Stanford University—the latter’s hometown providing the new headquarters for the company in Palo Alto, CA. In 2005, the company started providing social networking services to anyone who had a valid e-mail address ending in .edu. By 2006, Facebook was offering its website to anyone over the age of 13 who had a valid e-mail address (Newsroom Timeline, 2014). What made Facebook unique, at the time, was that it was the first SNS to offer the “news feed” on a user’s home page.

In all other SNSs before Facebook, in order to see what friends were doing, the user would have to click to that friend’s page. Facebook, instead, put a live feed of all changes users were posting—everything from relationship changes, to job changes, to updates of their status. In essence, Facebook made microblogging popular. This was a huge shift from MySpace, which had placed a tremendous amount of emphasis on traditional blogging, where people could type as much as they wanted. Interestingly, until July 2011, Facebook users were limited to 420 character status updates. Since November 2011, however, Facebook users have a staggering 63,206 characters to say what’s on their mind (Protalinski, 2011). The fact still remains, however, that Facebook’s original limit on characters used in status updates changed the way people were using websites for social networking and paved the way for sites such as Twitter, with its limitation of 140-character “tweets” (Dsouza, 2010).

Twitter was formed in 2006 by three employees of podcasting company Odeo, Inc.: Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone (Beaumont, 2008). It was created out of a desire to be able to stay in touch with friends easier than allowed by Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. Taking the concept of the 160 character limit text messaging imposed on users, Twitter shortened the message length down to 140 (to allow the extra 20 characters to be used for a user name) (“About,” 2014). In an interesting twist to the continuing story of character limits used to live stream our thoughts, media outlets have announced that Twitter will increase the character limits of tweets to 10,000 in early 2016 (Koh, 2016).

Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook clearly helped the cementing of social media within the landscape of the Internet. The last fifteen years of social media tells a story of more dynamic, specialized social media sites entering the scene and sharing the spotlight with the above mentioned giants. Sites such as LinkedIn, Snapchat, Vine, Instagram, and Reddit point toward the increasingly diversified and specialized trajectory social media is taking. LinkedIn was created in 2003 by Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Jean-Luc Vaillant,

Eric Ly, and Konstantin Guericke (Company History, 2014). LinkedIn returned the concept of SNSs to its old CompuServe roots. According to Stross (2012), LinkedIn is unique because “among online networking sites, LinkedIn stands out as the specialized one—it’s for professional connections only” (par. 1). So instead of helping the user find a long lost friend from high school, LinkedIn helps build professional connections, which in turn could lead to better job opportunities and more productivity. As of October 2015, LinkedIn had over 400 million members worldwide with 100 million active monthly users (Weber, 2015) and is leading the way in the unique section of SNSs that deals strictly with business relationships.

Snapchat, originally released under the name Picaboo, was created in 2011 by two Stanford University students, Evan Spiegel and Robert Murphy (Colao, 2012). The premise of Snapchat is simple: users send friends “snaps,” photographs, and videos that last anywhere from one to ten seconds, and when the time expires the photos or videos disappear. In addition to the fleeting nature of the snap, if the recipient of a snap screen captures it, Snapchat will let the sender know that the person they sent it to saved it. To say that Snapchat has become popular would be an understatement. By October 2012, one billion snaps had been sent, and the app averaged more than 20 million snaps a day (Gannes, 2012). In November 2013, Snapchat turned down a $3 billion offer in cash from Facebook, and as of late 2015, the company was valued between $12-16 billion (Fiegerman, 2015).

Instagram was originally developed by the Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in 2010 as a photo-taking application where users could apply various filters to the photographs and then up-load them to the Internet. In 2011, Instagram added the ability to hashtag the photographs uploaded as a way to find both users and photographs (Introducing hashtags, n.d.). Facebook purchased Instagram in 2012 from Systrom and Krieger for $1 billion in cash and stock (Langer, 2013). By the time Facebook acquired the filtered photo app giant, Instagram had over 30 million users (Upbin, 2012). While many in the tech industry saw Facebook’s extravagant price paid for Instagram as a bad business decision, the move has proved to be lucrative as Instagram quickly grew to more than 100 million users and has become one of the most popular social media sites on the planet. Not to be outdone, Twitter bought the video-sharing start up Vine for $30 million in 2012 (Vine, 2014). Vine was created by Dominik Hoffman, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll the year before and operated as a private, invite-only application (Dave, 2013). After purchasing Vine, Twitter released the video app on Apple’s app store in January 2013. By June 2013 it already had 13 million iOS users when the company released the app for Android on Google Play (Crook, 2014).

Perhaps the ultimate, if not most misunderstood and underrated, example of the increasingly specialization of social media is the website Reddit. The self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet,” Reddit is the epitome of the user generated content that is the hallmark of Web 2.0. Reddit was developed in 2005 by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman when the pair wanted to create an aggregate website of the most popular and shared links on the Internet. In addition to the moderators posting links on the site, Reddit also allowed users to post their favorite links to the site. In its first few years, the website was competing with sites like Del.icio.us and Digg, however, in 2008, Reddit allowed the ability for users to create pages for specialized content, also known as subreddits (Fiegerman, 2014). The creation of subreddits proved to be the major turning point for Reddit, letting users to both post their own content and to create pages within the website to share content on a specific thing. As of February 2016, there are over 810,000 subreddits hosted on the site, up from 602,000 subreddits available at the same time the year before (New Subreddits, n.d.). There are subreddits for just about every topic imaginable, and while this liberty has created issues surrounding questionable to illegal content (Fiegerman, 2014), the self-generated and self-policing on the site has created a massive community of Redditors, participating in a global social media experiment where you are just as liable to find a plethora of cat pictures as you are a group of Redditors saving a fellow user from the temptation of suicide. Reddit has been slow to the adoption of mobile technologies, but the site is a hallmark of the social media trend of today: giving users what they want, when they want it.

Recent Developments

Social media, like other innovations of Web 2.0, display the hallmark of constant and consistent innovation. Each of the aforementioned sites have continued to grow and adapt the ever-changing wants and desires of their users and the Internet society. Social media is a mirror of the Internet as a whole—an organic, seemingly living breathing thing that is at times unpredictable and volatile. One thing is for certain, though: social media is here to stay. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit are mainstays in many of our lives and as we grow accustom to them, there are new ones vying for our attention. As we make room for the new, businesses across the globe use well established social media sites as viable platforms to vie for our attention as well. In this section, we will examine new trends on the scene for social media, the use of social media by businesses as a form of outreach and advertising, and finally, the social and psychological implications of social media use on individuals.

One of the most interesting and exciting new forms of social media to come on the scene since 2015 are live streaming apps like Periscope and Meerkat. These new social media sites are mirroring the overall trends of online technology by utilizing the trend toward visual media combined with the expectation of on-demand entertainment. Meerkat, like Twitter and Foursquare before it, found its initial viral explosion at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Festival in Austin, TX (Newton, 2015). The app, which was hastily thrown together by Ben Rubin, became an overnight sensation at SXSW, with seemingly everyone by the end of the festival live streaming the minutiae of their lives. Within weeks, celebrities like Al Roker and Jimmy Fallon were allowing fans and followers peeks into their lives via live streaming videos (Newton, 2015). At nearly the same time Meerkat was taking SXSW by storm, Twitter quietly announced their acquisition of another live streaming, social media app, Periscope. Periscope was developed by Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein, and after paying $100 million for the app, Twitter took it live in March 2015 (Pierce, 2015). Periscope and Meerkat are similar in their concept and purpose, however their design and execution show a departure from one another. Meerkat is similar to the beginning stages of Snapchat, where once the video stream has ended, there is no way to watch it again. In addition, there is no articulated list of followers, and there is no way to let people who you are watching know what you think about their stream, per se. In this sense, Meerkat does not necessarily constitute a social networking site. It is a site unto itself, a form of socially acceptable voyeurism. Periscope, on the other hand, has become a new extension of Twitter. The app allows for an articulated list of followers and those you follow, and when you log into the app, you can see all of the live videos streaming from the people on your list. In addition, your followers can comment, in real time, to the video you are live streaming. Finally, the videos you watch and stream yourself are available on the app for up to 24 hours afterward (Pierce, 2015). As Pierce (2015) put it: “Periscope is consensual voyeurism” (par., 5).

Another (relatively) new form of social media that is quietly taking the world by storm is cross-platform messaging apps such as Whatsapp, Hangout, and Touch. While apps like these cannot be strictly considered a social networking site, these apps are ushering in a new era of connectivity and communication for those who are looking for alternatives their traditional texting apps on their mobile devices. There has been an increase in cross-platform texting apps, including upgrades the text and chat functions of Apple’s iMessage and Facebook’s Messenger, respectively. The attractiveness of cross-platform messaging apps signals how truly global social media has become. Apps like Whatsapp allow for true transcontinental, cross-platform messaging. Why is this a big deal? This is important for two reasons: the first is that these apps eliminate the fees that are associated with text messaging (Gara, 2014). In the United States, free, unlimited texting is taken nearly for granted as nearly all smartphone plans include it as part of the package. The same cannot be said throughout the world where users in many countries still pay a per text fee in their phone plans. In addition, cross-platform messaging apps also allow users to circumvent the archaic short messaging service (SMS) applications that are standard on most phones (Gara, 2014). This might not seem like a huge development, but this trend of cross-platform social media that allows users to communicate regardless of the device, operating system, phone, or data plan they are using is the trend of the future. Facebook found the concept of Whatsapp attractive enough to purchase it for $19 billion in 2014, even though it had a similar program, via Messenger (Gara, 2014).

More pertinent perhaps than the most recent developments in new forms of social media are the developments taking place in regards to social media and the business world. Businesses are starting to finally embrace the fact that people are going to be online and on social networks while at work. As businesses start to embrace the use of social media while on the job, it may spell the end of email as the major form of work communication. One social media site that has recently come on the scene is Slack, an app that allows for group chat and searchable archives for business communication. Facebook is starting beta testing of Facebook at Work to allow for better communication among employees at businesses (Holmes, 2015; 2016).

Another signal of businesses embracing social media in the workplace is the creation of chief social media officer positions and dedicated social media teams (Holmes, 2015). Most major businesses are creating dedicated positions or departments to handle the growing demand for effective social media presence. Rather than outsourcing their efforts to an advertising company, businesses are keeping the task of social media in-house, eliminating intermediaries and maintaining control of their social media image. The creation of social media departments within companies also signals the integration of advertising on social media. Businesses are showing an overall shift in regards to social networking, not only internally by creating social media departments and allowing the use of social media within the workplace, but also as a useful and effective advertising tool (Holmes, 2015). Nearly all major companies have launched full advertising campaigns on social media, using each unique platform as a different way to get the word out about their products or services. Facebook is littered with sponsored content from companies large and small. One of the most understated and successful social media advertising campaigns on Facebook in 2015 was Buzzfeed’s Tasty, a creative recipe publisher that gained 14 million Facebook followers and millions of views for every video posted (David, 2015). Tasty is a perfect example of how creative businesses have become with their social media advertising. Most people would not recognize it as advertising, but the videos directed the traffic of millions of viewers and followers to Buzzfeed every week.

One more unique way businesses are putting social media to work is by using it for customer service. Send out a tweet and get it answered by the company almost immediately. Post on a company’s Facebook page and get a reply in minutes. No more calling a customer service line to listen to terrible hold music only to be cut off when the call is answered. (Holmes, 2016). According to a study done by J.D. Power 67% of consumers have used a company’s social media page for customer service (Poor social media, 2013). Companies are now employing teams of people to monitor their social media sites to effectively work as the 21^st century call center. There have been numerous examples in the media of businesses using social media both effectively and ineffectively as another form of customer service outreach. One company that is nailing social media customer service is Nike. According to Helmrich (2014), Nike created a dedicated Twitter handle, @NikeSupport, to provide real time support to their over four million Twitter followers. Questions or concerns tweeted to @NikeSupport are often answered within a few minutes, cutting down the hassle and stress of having to contact customer service. Like, Nike, Walmart uses its Facebook page as a customer service forum, where its almost 34 million followers can post their complaints, questions, and concerns and most often get a fast, friendly reply (Helmrich, 2014).

Superior customer service is not necessarily to be expected across the board as companies learn to adapt to this relatively new technology. There have been numerous, often humorous, examples of social media customer service nightmares. For example, after an especially disastrous turn on the reality television show, Kitchen Nightmares, Amy’s Baking Company was lambasted by Internet users on social media sites like Facebook and Reddit. Rather than allowing the frenzy to die down online, the owners of the restaurant tried to fight back, insulting customers and Internet trolls alike. The epic flamewar between Amy’s Baking Company and social media in general resulted in several criminal investigations against the company, including an investigation into whether or not the restaurant was illegally stealing tips from its employees (10 brands damaged, 2013). The examples of bad customer service via social media are few and far between compared to the growing satisfaction amongst individuals who are using companies’ profile pages as a new way to get in contact with their favorite brands. Plus, you get to pick whatever hold music you want to listen to while you wait for a response.

Social media is evolving everyday into a real time, live streaming, living, breathing entity that is being effectively utilized by individuals and businesses alike. However, with the seeming ubiquity of social media in most of our lives, there is one aspect of social media use that is not often talked about, and that is the social and psychological effects of social media use. Social networking sites and social media in general has been available on the Internet now for almost two decades, but this has not been nearly enough time to understand the social and psychological ramifications for how living part of our lives in the virtual realm can affect us long term.

There has been some research done on topics like cyberbullying and support that signal a need for a larger conversation about how we can make social media a healthier place for all of us to dwell. According to a review of 36 studies conducted on cyberbullying, the approximate median of all studies combine had 23% of teenagers reporting being bullied online, and 15% of teenagers reporting they bullied someone online (Pappas, 2015). In addition, this research has shown a link between cyberbullying as a teenager and depression that carries through to adulthood (Pappas, 2015). One aspect of online use that may be contributing to the issue of cyberbullying is the amount of time spent online. In research conducted by the Pew Research Center, 24% of teenagers aged 13-17 reported being on the Internet almost constantly (Lenhart, 2015). This shift to living a virtual life in addition to our “real world lives” can also be seen in the community and social support we build online. We all have the Facebook friend who has 3,000 “friends” or 10,000 followers on Twitter or Instagram. Research suggests, however, that the average social media user can only count on approximately fifteen friends for sympathy, and only about four friends for actual social support when it is needed (Majaski, 2016). Even as we shift our social interactions and community support to the virtual realm and social media, we as humans still need, for the most part, face-to-face social interactions and support to stay psychologically healthy.

Current Status

Social media use is reaching a near saturation point amongst Internet users in the United States. According to a Pew Research Center study, 76% of adult Internet users access at least one social media site (Perrin, 2015). This is identical to the proportion of teenagers (aged 13-17) who were asked if they used social media, with 76% affirming they were on at least one social media site (Lenhart, 2015). (Figure 22.1) The growth of social media use across demographics since 2005 demonstrates how integral these sites have become to our overall Internet experience. In 2005, only 10% of the adult Internet-using population was using social media sites. A major part of this trend can be attributed to the increased use of mobile technologies to access the Internet, with 91% of teenage and 91% of adult mobile device users who access social media via their phone or tablet (Lenhart, 2015; Smith, 2015). The breakdown of individual social media site use is just as impressive, with Facebook leading the charge as the most widely used social network on the planet. (Figure 22.2)

Figure 22.1

Percentage of Internet Using Adults Versus All Adults Who Access Social Media

Source: Perrin (2015)

Figure 22.2

Percentage of American Adults Who Use Social Media, By Age

Source: Perrin (2015)

As of the third quarter of 2015, use of Facebook amongst adult Internet users in the United States has maintained at a staggering 72%, meaning that almost 3 out of 4 American’s online are active at some level on Facebook (Duggan, 2015). In addition, 70% of Facebook users report that they are on the site daily. According to Facebook (2016), as of December 31, 2015, there were 1.04 billion unique active Facebook users online every day. In addition, there were 934 million unique daily active mobile Facebook users online (Facebook, 2016).

One interesting statistic to look at when discussing the use of social media by Americans online is how the age demographics break down for each site. When I talk to students in my New Communication Technologies class (yes, I make them buy this book every semester too), I am often told that while they still have a Facebook account, they mostly utilize it to talk to their parents or grandparents and that they are much more likely to utilize other sites and apps like Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram to connect with their friends and people their own age. Data collected by the Pew Research Institute lends credibility to these sentiments. According to Duggan (2015), 82% of American Internet users between the ages of 18-29 use at least one form of social media. The most popular, as was stated previously, is Facebook at 82%, however, there is above a 60% saturation of Facebook use among American Internet users under the age of 65 (Duggan, 2015). By comparison, while Instagram boasts membership amongst 55% of American Internet users between the ages of 1829, there is a sharp drop off of only 28% of users between the ages of 30-49, 11% between the ages of 40-65, and 4% above the age of 65. This trend is mimicked by most of the major social media sites, with most of their users being between the ages of 19-29 (Duggan, 2015). One exception is LinkedIn, which has more users between the ages of 30-49 and 50-65 than between the ages of 18-29. The logical explanation for this, however, can be attributed to the unique nature of LinkedIn as a social media site that is used specifically for making connections and maintaining relationships in regards to the professional and business world, so the demographics for that kind of site will be skewed more toward individuals who have started careers and are maintaining professional relationships.

Figure 22.3

Percentage of Internet, Social Media Users Worldwide

Source: Kemp (2105)

Often times Americans have a narrow vision of the use of social media. The number of social media users in the United States is staggering, but pulling back to look at the scope of social media use in the world is even more notable. Of the 7.21 billion people on the planet, approximately 3.01 billion are connected to the Internet (Kemp, 2015). There are 2.07 billion active social media users among those who are online (Kemp, 2015). In addition, there are 3.65 billion unique mobile phone users, of which 1.66 billion are accessing mobile social media (Kemp, 2015). (Figure 22.3) Facebook is still the number one most accessed social media site, with 47% of worldwide Internet users having Facebook accounts. To help put this number in perspective, Facebook is still restricted in most of China, with legal access only being granted within a 17-mile radius of Shanghai (Woollaston, 2013). As the restrictions of social media start to relax across the world, the number of users for specific social media sites should continue to increase, and in the United States and Western world, we might start to see well established social media sites from other parts of the world make their way here.

Factors to Watch

The most obvious factor to watch is the continued trend toward mobile technologies, with a decrease in laptop/desktop use for accessing social media. Mobile technologies are taking over as the go to for all things regarding Internet access, and social media is no exception. Many social media sites are created specifically as mobile apps with no desktop/laptop support, and this trend will continue. In addition, existing social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit will continue to improve their mobile user interfaces to make access and interaction on a smartphone more dynamic, intuitive and user friendly.

The new technology that we should pay attention to in regards to social media is virtual reality. In the very near future, there will be an increase in immersive technologies like Oculus Rift. The trend toward virtual reality and social media, while far-fetched, does feel like a natural trajectory given the intimacy we are already handing over to social networking sites through live streaming apps like Periscope and Meerkat. We are heading toward increasingly immersive social media experiences. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook buying Oculus Rift for $2 billion signals that the giants of social media understand the next wave of human-computer interaction may be via virtual reality. How the virtual reality technologies will play into the world of social media, however, remains to be seen. The new and upcoming social media experience could be fully immersive cat photos on Reddit.

Finally, expect to see a full embrace of social media by businesses, large and small. Most large corporations have expanded their outreach to include social media, but the future could see even more small businesses allocating part of their budgets to dedicated social media professionals to handle their online presence. The future of commerce is online, and social media are the virtual communities where businesses can reach their most lucrative markets. In addition, you might expect to see a continued integration of online shopping sites into our social media experience. Amazon and other similar sites already allow you to post what you have just purchased on your social media profile, but expect to see an increase in being able to buy from businesses right from your social media homepage. Dominos Pizza already allows customers to text an order, perhaps soon, we will be able to order our pizza without ever having to navigate away from the live stream of your new Periscope video.

Getting a Job

Social media, through sheer staying power, is a force to be reckoned with and, as more businesses start to take the whole genre of sites seriously, there has been the creation of numerous new jobs. According to the Daily Muse (2016), whether you want to be the chief media officer of a company or a developer or anything in between, there are a few tips you should keep in mind when hitting the job market. First, be proficient in all forms of social media. It is not enough to be a Twitter monster or a Facebook fiend, knowing all of the social media apps, new and old, will help you stand out as a proficient employee (Daily Muse, 2016). Next, know the industry. This is similar to knowing the different forms of social media, but it takes more than knowing how to operate the apps. Know about the history of the industry, and the history of the company you are applying to (Daily Muse, 2016). This shows your potential employers that you have a passion for the industry as a whole and their business in particular. Finally, be familiar with the need-to-know programs (Daily Muse, 2016). Be proficient in photo programs, HTML, video editing, etc. Businesses are more likely to find you an attractive candidate if they can see that you are ready to hit the ground running as a contributing member of their team. Businesses, large and small, are beginning to realize that in order to stay relevant, they are going to need to have a social media presence, which means that no matter what industry you are interested in, if you love social media, there will be a job for you.

References

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