Category:Social Media

The Big 4

$=The Big 4=$

=The Big 4=

There are many players in the social media game, but four of them dominate the landscape in terms of active smartphone users. These dominating players are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

Welcome to Facebook
Facebook is the most pervasive social media platform around today, as well as the third most popular smartphone app behind e-mail and browsers. It separates itself from other social media services by letting users define a huge portion of the site with regard to features, looks and feel, and privacy settings. How extensively has Facebook ingrained itself in every day life? Over 85 million people access Facebook from their smartphones on a regular basis. Let's examine the Facebook phenomenon a little closer by assuming that you represent the "average" Facebook smartphone app user...

 You check your account from your smartphone roughly 14 times per day, for about 2 minutes and 22 seconds each time. Your favorite time to check your account and update your status is in the evening just before bedtime. You spend roughly half an hour each day wandering around the Facebook smartphone app. 

The magnitude of your Facebook addiction has been brought to light now, but it can't just be you, right? To ease your nerves, take a look at some other Facebook smartphone app use statistics.

 Approximately 70% of smartphone users visit Facebook frequently, and over 50% of smartphone users visit every day. 50% of users admit to checking Facebook in movie theaters. 48% update statuses and check on friends while at the gym. 47% visit Facebook while preparing meals at home.</li> 46% use Facebook while running errands, including at red lights and in check-out lines.</li>

So, what is it about Facebook that keeps people coming back 14 times a day? Let's talk features! For the sake of brevity, we'll keep it to the most used features. <ol>  News Feed AKA stalking..?   Social Ticker - A real time display of your activities from your friends and pages you've liked that shows status updates, events, photo uploads, birthdays, friend-to-friend conversations, relationship status changes, and many more activities your friends and/or pages may engage in.</li>  Completely customizable - you get to decide who shows up in your news feeds and which of their specific activities you want to hear about.</li>  Two Way Street - You also decide who gets updates about which of your activities.</li>  Business Implication - Businesses take advantage of the real time display by offering coupons, promotions, and advertisements from their Facebook pages under the assumption that users who have liked their page will see them.</li> </ul>  Timeline - Day by day, Photo by Photo, Milestone by Milestone - Facebook's timeline organizes all of your personal information into categorical and chronological order. Your timeline offers a who/what/when/where display of   Your statuses  Posts on your wall from friends, including photos, videos, attachemnts, or just text  Your posts on friends' walls  Events you attended as well as events you plan to attend  Photos you're tagged in  Photos you uploaded  Your personal information pages <li> When you modify your personal information <li> Milestones in your life - like getting engaged, married, or having a baby <li> Content you "like" and content you've commented on <li> Who you've recently added to your friends list <li> Many other things! You can choose exactly who sees what on your timeline, and you can choose to hide some or all of your information from whomever you choose, or you can hide it all from everyone! </ul> <li> Other Features <ul> <li> Friending - The friend function on Facebook allows users to send one another requests to connect on Facebook. Users receiving requests have the option to confirm or decline, and the sender is only notified when a request is confirmed. "Unfriending" occurs when a user removes another user from his or her friend list. Additionally, Facebook users determine who sees what parts of their timelines and personal information. <li> Facebook Messaging - Combining the features of e-mail, text messaging, and instant messaging, Facebook messaging is a one-stop shop allowing users to send group messages, group chats, attachments, and manage contacts all from their Facebook accounts. <li> Notifications - Facebook notifications alert users when content has been added or modified from their timeline or from a page they like, a group they're in, or a network they're a part of. For example, notifications may appear on a user's timeline when that person is invited to an event, when someone posts on their wall, when a business they like posts a new status or promotion, or when their friends have upcoming birthdays. As is the mantra with Facebook, the individual users controls what actions send them notifications on their individual timelines. <li> Photo Sharing - This is one of the most popular features on Facebook, exemplified by the 1.5 million-plus gigabytes of online storage occupied by Facebook users' photos. Smartphones make this feature even more accessible and pervasive, as Facebook offers users the ability to photograph something using the camera on their phone and have it instantly uploaded to their timeline or even to friends' timelines. Users can upload photos as statuses with text accompaniments or directly to new or existing photo albums. </ul> </ol>

LinkedIn: The World's Largest Professional Network
LinkedIn is a social media network designed specifically for people in the professional world. While it predates Facebook by one year, it still does not boast the number of worldwide users that Facebook does, especially in the mobile department. The features of LinkedIn are not as far-reaching as those of Facebook, as LinkedIn is designed for a much more specific purpose than is Facebook and operates quite differently as well. Nevertheless, LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network with over 225 million active users (this is not a smartphone-specific number), and offers the following features to users:

<ol> <li> Connections - Connections are the contacts that users make and manage on the network. Essentially, a LinkedIn user can invite anyone to "connect", regardless of whether or not the invitee is a member of LinkedIn. An invitee has the option to accept the connection, or to select "I don't know" or "Spam" in response to the invite. If the inviter receives too many of these negative responses to his invites, his account can be disabled or restricted. <li> A Matter of Degree - Contact management and many features are driven by first, second, and third degree connections. This dynamic feature is used to gain access to contacts of mutual friends or mutual contacts. <li> Defining Yourself and Finding Jobs - LinkedIn users can design and fill out their own profile templates and/or upload resumes or curriculum vitae to the site. Based on the skills and job qualifications listed on profiles, the user herself can search for jobs that meet her qualifications, or hiring managers search for qualifications and skills for a job opening. Those users searching for jobs can locate hiring managers and delve into their own contacts to see if any first, second, or third degree connections could play a role in gaining access to the hiring manager. <li> Keeping up - LinkedIn users can also follow companies in order to get the latest news about the companies, changes in management, job openings, etc. Users can also keep track of jobs they are interested in by bookmarking openings, companies, or people. </ol>

Instagram: Capture and Share the World's Moments
Instagram, now owned by and synced to Facebook, functions essentially as a public photographic diary for its users. Instagram users create a profile, decide if their account is public (viewable by everyone) or private (only viewable by followers) and begin choosing who they want to follow with their Facebook account, if applicable. That is, when Instagram users create an account, Instagram automatically asks if they would like to register using their Facebook account. If so, then Instagram identifies all the new user's Facebook friends with active Instagram accounts, generates a list accordingly, and lets the new user choose which friends he would like to follow. Additionally, Facebook will notify the new user when one of his Facebook friends creates an Instagram account. Alternatively, Instagram users can search for others with similar interests through the hashtag search function, or by searching for specific account names. Similar to other social media services, Instagram has far more uses and features today than it probably intended. Below are some dominant features and uses:

<ol> <li> Photo Sharing: Filtered or Unfiltered? - <li> #Hashtagging - While hashtagging originated on Twitter, it permeates the majority of posts on Instagram. Hashtagging functions as tool to categorize, classify, or otherwise organize photographs or posts. In addition to allowing users to classify their content, hashtagging is a powerful social mechanism that can drive pop culture trends if enough people begin using a given hashtag. Denoted by "#tbt", "Throwback Thursday" is a perfect example of this phenomenon in action. <li> Business Implications <ul> <li> Sponsorshop - <li> Contests & Coupons - <li> Advertising - </ul>