How Social Media has Revolutionized Communication
Man has always been a social animal and for this reason, he has always lived in a complex social structure. Today, the Internet has added up a new facet to this aspect by means of a concept called social media.
Social media is an umbrella term that is composed of technologies where millions of people can share their ideas, experience and information to each other inside a window. This is something that has been, and still is, evolving. Before the 1990′s people never had the opportunity to socialize and learn things that were taking place outside of their home, workplace or personal social circles.
Today, social communication has certainly changed! With immense improvements in computer technology, we are all now blessed with social networking websites through internet. In general, social media comes in many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. All these are incorporated with technologies such as blogs, picture-sharing, wall-postings, music-sharing, emailing, instant messaging, Video Blogging (Vlogs), crowdsourcing (crowd outsourcing) and voice over IP. Some of the best social media/networking sites are:
- Google Plus Video & Web Social Platform
- Wikipedia Group – Reference Website
- MySpace – Social Networking Website
- Facebook – Social Networking Website
- Last.fm – Personal Music Website
- YouTube – Social Networking and Video Sharing Website
- Second Life – Virtual Reality Website
- Instagram – Photo Sharing Website
- Twitter – Social Networking and Microblogging Website
The past few decades were probably the most crucial for those who were involved in developing social media platforms. Gradually, people started to have a unique attraction towards these innovative ways of learning new things and knowing new people from around the world. Today, we are almost at the peak of excelling in the innovation process.
Here are some of the astounding facts about social media websites:
- By means of social media, there are over 5 million conversations taking place online – 24/7.
- 3 out of 4 Americans use social technology in his or her everyday life.
- Almost 2 out of 3 of the global internet population visit social networks on a weekly basis.
- Visiting social sites is now the 4th most popular online activity, ahead of personal E-mail.
- The time spent by a person on social networks is growing 3 times more than that of the overall internet rate.
- Social media is democratizing communication
- YouTube plays a major part in social media and it would take approximately 412.3 years to view every video currently on YouTube.
- About 100,000,000 YouTube videos are viewed per day.
- 13,000,000 articles are available on Wikipedia.
- 3,600,000,000 photos are archived on Flickr.com.
- The average number of tweets per day on Twitter.com is 3,000,000.
- The number of minutes spent on Facebook each day is 5,000,000,000.
- The amount of content (i.e. web links, news stories, Blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week on Facebook is 1,000,000,000.
- If Facebook were a country, it would be the 8th most populated in the world – just ahead of Japan.
Since social media has had such an impact on out lives, we can only expect for more revolutions in the coming years.
