I thought this video pretty much sums up how social networking works. The real advantage of a social network being online rather than reality is that it is possible to explore who your friends know with the click of a button, without having to ask about or meet them… you can essentially stalk the people you know to find out who else they know and how they know them…scary, yet useful when you take into account how this can help in the professional world of finding jobs and useful contacts.
By now it’s likely that most frequent users on the internet have encountered social networking online at some point, whether by signing up to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Bebo, or one of the many social networking sites, to viewing a video on youtube, or photos on flickr.
Social networking sites allow users to easily keep in contact with friends, family, colleagues, and to meet other like minded people, with the advantage that most of these sites are free to join and maintain. The basic concept of these sites is creating contacts, sharing and responding with them. Various sites hold different features, such as creating a profile about themselves, adding media, and tagging friends, while keeping friends and followers informed by updating their status.
Many of the more popular sites tend to offer the same features, so why chose one over another? It all comes down to what your friends are using; it’s much easier to stay in contact if you’re all using the same site. For example many young people and students are probably likely to choose Facebook rather than Twitter, as it’s what their friends use, whereas Twitter attracts a slightly older, more professionally orientated crowd of users, as they know they’re more likely to find people of similar interests. Some users also prefer to have all of these features on one site, rather than having to check several sites for updates.
These sites can easily become addictive; with users spending hours browsing through profiles to see what they’re contacts are doing, simply because friends and family are what interest them. This addiction is what makes these sites so successful, with new content constantly being uploaded by users, there’s always something new to look at. Many social networking sites use this as a main characteristic of the site; known as UGC, User Generated Content means that the majority of what’s on the site is generated by users uploading more content such as pictures, and adding comments. This also means that the site is easier to maintain by the owners whilst still attracting more visits.
Gaming sites can also be seen as a form of social networking, as users compete with each other, this can again become very addictive, they have a motivation to keep playing and compete to be the best. This ties in with how social networking can create a hierarchy amongst users, with people competing to have create more contacts, on forums users who post more regularly are viewed as more valued and important members of that particular community.
When linking social networking with ideas of promotion, we can consider that the more people we have as contacts, the more useful connections we are able to form. A social network can serve as platform for an announcement or promotion of something, getting the message across to a lot of people, for example a status update on Facebook or Twitter, a bulletin posted on MySpace or a video uploaded to Youtube. Users are not necessarily registered as a person, but maybe a musician, clothing company, photographer or another form of business, this can be a way to converse directly with fans or business peers and find out what other things they’re talking about, and if it’s about them. Members of a company could also use it as a form of promotion, by posting comments on active forums or blogs in order to get people interested and talking about their company.
Useful Links:
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/my-best-advice-about-social-networking/
