Social Media: Take The Good With The Bad

Social Media is basically the source of creating and sharing information, ideas, interests, passion by means of various platforms as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn etc. It’s a catch-all term which is used for connecting with the audience and building relationships or communities. Like many buzzwords, the meaning of social media is a dynamic which gets shifted around based on what the person using it wants it to mean.

Users engage with social media via computer, tablets or smartphone and even by a web-based software or web application, these platforms are often utilized for messaging. Social Media is a web2.0 based platform which has more than 3 billion users at this time.

The Many Forms of Social Media:

• Facebook: It’s the world’s largest social network with more than 1.55 billion active users, It is a platform where Users create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages including status updates, locations etc.

• Instagram: A free photo and video sharing app that allows users to apply digital filters, frames and special effects to their photos, videos and it helps to create boomerangs too ;)

• LinkedIn: A platform where professionals interact for similar interests in work or role pertaining to any organization.

• Snapchat: An application which allows users to share their videos or rather stories restraining the views to 24 hours.

• Tiktok: This media application is also known as Douyin (Chinese word) which is used to create and share short videos with database of filters and music.

The social media landscape is dominated by Facebook and YouTube There is a range of positive and negative on social media usage. Social media can help to improve an individual's sense of connection with online communities which can prove effective for communication and serve as a marketing tool for corporations, political parties etc. The pros also include encouraging you to interact with other learners from all around the world to directly put into practice and build your own online networks for learning and professional purposes. At the same time concerns have been raised about the links shared between social media use and even the issues like cyberbullying, online harassment and Trolling. The use of some platforms often leads to inattentiveness, stress and jealousy. The major pitfall in this case is also the need to maintain that “Social Self-image” due to which people create their profiles on such platforms and crave for those multiple views on their posts or updates.

In all, we can summarise social networks and media as great engagement tools for two way communication. Basically, there are no written "Stand up" or "Out of Line" rules when it comes to social media; only you can determine what will work for you.