WAIT!!! I see the connection!
Why is Social Media connection so desirable?
Well to me it’s amazing to be able to easily log on to social media and check out a recent picture or see what a friend is doing across the US. Social media allows us to keep that connection and it sure becomes addicting in a way after a while. Don’t you agree? Why is this so desirable to us? We can still have our connection with each other and easily hide our emotions behind a post. We can be whoever we want and whatever we want to be and no one will know unless they know us personally. In face to face social settings you are nearly obligated to respond because the person who you are being social with knows your there. When you communicate on social media you can say hello and even if the other person is there you won’t know it otherwise. As stated in Margalit(2014), “interactions via social media make visitors feel connected without the difficulties and complexities involved in face-to-face interactions. Compared to interactions with computers, interactions with human counterparts require more emotional involvement, cognitive effort and brain activation”. People also desire social media connection because it allows multiple people to hear what you have to say and when they get a “like” they feel a sense of importance because someone took the time out of their day to read what they wrote.
Homophily and Social Media….
What is Homophily you ask? TheFreeDictionary.com defines homophily as “A theory in sociology that people tend to form connections with others who are similar to them in characteristics such as socioeconomic status, values, beliefs, or attitudes”. So in other words, let’s say you like football and you click on a lot of football posts and advertisements, each time you log onto your profile there is a possibility that sites about football are going to be in your news feed as suggestions. You may also find yourself seeing suggested friends on Facebook either because they share some of your same interests or have mutual friends of you. This is how Homophily is used in social media.
How does platform algorithms lead to homphily is social media?
OK so you follow two people or pages and one of them you tend to look at their page more often and like their photos for instance, Facebook is set to show you more posts of that person that the one you look at less when you scroll through your news feed. The same thing goes when it comes to the marketing aspect. As stated in Bruce Clay Inc. (2016), “The Facebook algorithm takes into consideration engagement, relevance, timeliness, and thousands of other factors in an effort to populate people’s News Feeds with more of the stuff they want to see, as inferred by Facebook”. The more likes, comments, shares etc. a page has, the more chance for it to show up on the news feed of like-minded people who have recently searched a business such as yourself. The overall goal is to show you as the viewer more of what you want to see than what you don’t care to see. This is much like homophily because you are connected to things that are similar to what you want or believe in. Next time you google search something watch for that same item or something similar to pop up in an advertisement in your news feed. Its wild but that’s how they get you.
References:
homophily. (n.d.) American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. (2011). Retrieved April 27 2017 from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/homophily
Margalit, (2014). The Psychology Behind Social Media Interactions. Psychology Today Retrieved April, 27, 2017 From: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/behind-online-behavior/201408/the-psychology-behind-social-media-interactions
Bruce Clay, INC. (2016), Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog » What is the Facebook Algorithm? | Social Media Marketing 101 Retrieved April 27, 2017 From: