Blog Social Networking

Social Networking platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest all serve as different avenues a company or business can display their products. Many businesses started their online stores via Facebook and Instagram because they know how to selectively target their products to a specific audience/demographic.

The way that they can do these things is with Facebook and Instagram ads. If you're purchasing ads, for example, on Facebook, they have a ton of options of how you want to place your ad. You can choose the exact radius where the ad will be placed, for how many days and for how many times in a single day someone sees your ad. They also add all these cool features that lets you track how often someone is clicking on or viewing your ads, so that you can compile meaningful metrics to better judge what your business needs to do better. Pinterest is also pretty cool, because if someone finds something neat, it can go instantly viral with just a few clicks. There have been companies who've made tens of millions of dollars and doing things like going on shows like Shark Tank to pitch their business ideas. The benefits of this allows small businesses to aggressively find ways to make sales, while spending little on advertising and ads if they start garnering a lot of attention. In the article "Who Cares About Facebook Privacy? Students Do" we see that 18 and 19 year old's are actually changing the way Facebook manages their privacy, by managing it themselves. These individuals are obviously super concerned about what Facebook and their peers can see, and more people have been managing their privacy settings as the years have passed by. This would be the 'dark side' these technologies exhibit. Ads have a way of staying in your history and cookies and they can actually track you even if you leave Facebook. It not only gets annoying, but you seem to have to question whether or not you will have to start using private browsing or not in addition the to privacy settings you already changed on your account. Another example of dark side use of this technology would be politically, as President Obama was the first to use Social Media as a means to enhance his candidacy for the President of the United States. In the article "How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks' Power", we see that he really created a movement online like no other with his slogan "Yes We Can". It's all I saw on Facebook for 2 years, the picture of him with a red, blue and white background, painting this image of change after so many decades. The Obama administration used the networks to "topple" over their competition, including John McCain and Hilary Clinton who were not yet ready to take the same plunge into this means of campaigning. Now we see Donald Trump abusing Twitter, another form of networking, really taking things to another level where we now get to experience live or expressive comments for the Commander-In-Chief himself.


 
Sources:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html


 https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/who-cares-about-facebook-privacy-students-do/25877

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Next New Media

Wiki So Far

HW Creativity