Social Media Connections

Feeling Connected
Having social connections has become easier with the use of social media. Seeing what your friends and family are doing or talking about is just a click away. There are many different platforms which could offer the ability to interact with them on a daily basis, no matter where they are in the world. Two of the main reasons people use social media were to stay in touch with others and find online social support.
Staying connected can be linked to having social support. If someone is having a rough time, they will be able to communicate with their social networks. Their followers, friends, or family will have the ability to provide positive feedback to the individuals problems (Liu & Wei, 2018).
Homophily
Homophily is the concept of people who have similar interests will bond well together. In social media, this could be friends who follow each other or people who form online groups to share information with each other (Fu, Nowak, Christakis, & Fowler, 2012). Social media consists of many platforms where people can find like-minded individuals and make new connections.
Algorithms in Social Media
Social media websites use algorithms and programs to help users find others with similar interests. These can include data analyzing and mining tools which collect data from an individual’s social media account (Carullo, Castiglione, Santis, & Palmeiri, 2015). Then, it will link the individual with those who have liked the same pages or shared the same articles. For example, Facebook creates a list of people who share some kind of similarity with you, who you may or may not want to add to your own friends list.
References
Carullo, G., Castiglione, A., De Santis, A., & Palmieri, F. (2015). A triadic closure and homophily-based recommendation system for online social networks. World Wide Web, 18(6), 1579–1601. doi:10.1007/s11280–015–0333–5
Fu, F., Nowak, M. A., Christakis, N. A., & Fowler, J. H. (2012). The evolution of homophily. Scientific Reports, 2(1), 845. doi:10.1038/srep00845
Liu, B., & Wei, L. (2018). Modeling social support on social media: Effect of publicness and the underlying mechanisms. Computers in Human Behavior, 87, 263–275. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2018.05.006