No Longer Grandma's Sewing Circle

Social media has shaped the way people (around the world) communicate, and the rules of engagement in communications are not the same as they used to be. 

ithout question, social media has quickly become the most common way that Internet users communicate with one another. This rapid growth in the past six years has had a major effect on the way customers, organizations and business partners do business. In a survey posted on The Social Skinny, statistic show that 62% of adults worldwide now use social media. Another interesting statistic is that in quarter one of 2012, social media users logged an average of twenty-four minutes per day on gaming apps on social media platforms and mobile applications. So, without question, social media has shaped the way people (around the world) communicate, and the rules of engagement in communications are not the same as they used to be. 

Below, you will find a list of four of the most common social media outlets today. While there are new social media applications being created on a daily basis, one thing is common between all of these applications. People are looking for ways to stay connected, in real time. Whether it be quick blurbs about what they are doing or the freedom to write down their deepest inner thoughts in full length, people now have a desire to share what is happening in their lives, and family and friends are buying into the concept that even though we live in a world of globalization, distance can no longer be a factor in not keeping up with each other.

Twitter:

Twitter is a social media outlet, or a micro-blog which is used to connect users together on various platforms on connected to the Internet. The unique thing about Twitter is that it only allows users to make posts of up to 140 characters. So, essentially this platform us for short and/or abbreviated posts called “tweets”. Twitter has taken on a life of its own, because it has been used for much more than social interactions. Twitter is now used on the majority of media outlets (i.e. news stations, sports stations, radio stations) and has also been used as a primary means of communication in large scale events such as uprisings in Libya, Syria etc.

In 2012, Twitter hailed over 500 million users who generated on average over 340-million tweets per day. Twitter has become the eighth most-visited website on the Internet and its many uses and continue to evolve as many third party companies work to create different applications that link into the Twitter infrastructure (ex: Twitpic, Hootsuite, Tweetstats).

The audience for Twitter is limitless. While it does require some tech-savvy skills, Twitter is very user friendly and doesn’t require much more than a connection to the internet in some capacity (i.e. cell phone, computer, smart phone, iPad)

Facebook:

Facebook is another social media outlet which has evolved quickly since its conception nearly ten years ago. What started as the brain child of Mark Zuckerburg. In his book titled, “The Facebook Effect” author David Kirkpatrick spoke about the rise of social networks, but more specifically the way Facebook completely shattered the mold for the common use of the Internet. An epochal change on the Internet was announced in March 2009 by the Nielsen Company research firm. Time spent on the social networks by Internet users worldwide had for the first time exceeded the amount of time Internet users spent on email. A new form of communication had gone mainstream (Kirkpatrick, 2010). He also gave an impressive statistic about Facebook’s growth in total Internet usage between ’08 and ’09, when he revealed that a study conducted by the Nielsen confirmed that time spent on Facebook had increased 566% in one year.

The audience of Facebook is evolving as well. While it was originally created for student at Harvard, it quickly spread across many campuses in the USA. Once the phenomenon caught on it was opened up to anyone 13 years of age or older. Today, the audience is wide open and global. Companies, bands, individuals and organizations have Facebook pages and are using this social media outlet for many different purposes.

Blogs:

Blogs are still a fairly common way of communication for many individuals and organizations. As we discovered last week, there are many different purposes for blogs. Some are to meet very specific purposes, such as cooking instructions or healthy living etc. However other blogs, like the Huffington Post, are a much larger scale resource which essentially work and run as online news resources much like the big printed paper of old. The blogosphere has evolved greatly over the past several years as well as social media has become the new wave of passing information both nationally as well as globally. Blogs are being developed for many different audiences. While some blogs have a very narrow scope of influence, others have a much larger influence and even a staff of different writers and/or editors contributing to the content.

Vimeo:

Vimeo is another social media outlet, but it has a much less broad scope of influence. While Vimeo certainly interactions with many of the other social media technologies, up to this point it has been strictly a video sharing application. While there are plenty of different account types you can have through Vimeo, the tool continues to be used solely for producing and sharing video. The audience of this resource is anyone who has a desire to share videos online. The quality of the Vimeo videos seems to be a bit better than Youtube and in most cases the videos have a more secure hosting plan unless otherwise setup by the authors. Content can be stored and only shared as desired and therefore it gives the authors of the content a lot more control over who can and cannot access their videos. Vimeo also remains on the cutting edge of design and layout for their customers. While Youtube continues to struggle to keep their user base happy, Vimeo places a great deal of its time, resources, energy and effort into ensuring they are keeping their customers happy. For example, Vimeo worked hard to allow its users to customize the thumbnails used to statically display their video. Essentially what this does is allow the creators the opportunity to take any frame from their video and turn it into a thumbnail to promote their video. Because a video is moving content, it’s important to be able to capture your audience’s attention with customized thumbnails which will better indicate the content of the video. Youtube, who is probably a more well known video sharing application did not have this feature and instead randomly selected frames form the video which it would then allow the creators to choose from. Youtube has since stated that they are working towards allowing their creators to choose and customize thumbnails of their own, but at this point it is still a work in progress (Manarino, 2012).

While there is obviously a battle going on between all the video sharing media services, the one thing that Vimeo has continued to grasp is the strategy of putting the creativity and control in the hands of the creators and owners of the content. When a customer feels empowered to create, freely, they will be more likely to consider Vimeo as a tool to help them accomplish their needs. Vimeo has also worked hard to ensure that they plug into other social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ which will allow their customers to share their video content more freely.


Resources:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/twitter.com

Kirkpatrick, D. (2010). The facebook effect, the inside story of the company that is connecting the world. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Manarino, M. (2012, August 21). Vimeo has custom thumbnails & why all youtube partners should have them too. Retrieved from http://newmediarockstars.com/2012/08/vimeo-has-custom-thumbnails-why-youtube-partners-should-have-them-also/