What is Social Media?
Introduction (About Blog Topic and Posts)
Have you ever thought why do politicians choose Social Media to communicate with people when it is time for an election? Or how is Social Media changing the game when it comes to political elections and voting?
In a series of five blog posts, we will discuss How Social Media Affects Political Elections. The blog posts will be about a general overview of social media, The Power behind social media, The Social Movement Theory, News Consumption on various Platforms and How does social media affect Political Elections?
What is Social Media?
According to Margaret Rouse (2020), social media is a collective term for websites and applications like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, .etc which focus on communication, community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration. Amongst the different types of social media one can also include forums, microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking, social curation, and wikis as they are shared social spaces for team members who work remotely.
By its design, social media is an online tool which provides users with the quick electronic communication of content. Content includes personal information, documents, videos, and photos. Users engage with social media via a computer, tablet or smartphone and often using it for messaging (Maya E. Dollarhide, 2020).
Dollarhide (2020) argues that social media-originated as a way to interact with friends and family but was later endorsed by businesses which wanted to take advantage of a popular new communication method to reach out to their current and future customers. The power of social media is the ability to connect and share information with anyone on Earth, or with as many people as possible in real-time. According to Dean (2020), there are 3.81 billion people who use social media worldwide in 2020, up almost double from 2.07 billion in 2015.
Dollarhide (2020) argues that according to the Pew Research Center, social media users tend to be from younger generations. This was shown as nearly 90% of individuals between the ages of 18 and 29 used at least one form of social media. Furthermore, these users tend to be better educated and relatively wealthy.
How Does the Average Person use Social Media?
So far we know what social media is and what type of people use these platforms. But how does the average individual spend his/her time on these tools?
According to Clement (2020), as of 2019, the average daily use of social media per user amounted to 144 minutes (2 hours 24 minutes). Although this average was taken from a worldwide perspective, Wendy (2020) explains that when the comparison is made with different individual countries, the average time on social media differs from one to the other. Wendy (2020) argues that South Americans lead the race with 3 hours 29 minutes per day, followed by 3 hours 10 minutes by Africans, 2 hours 6 minutes by North Americans, 2 hours 16 minutes by Asians, and 1 hour 53 minutes by the European residents.
According to Wendy (2020) out of the population of nearly 8 billion people, 2.2 billion were active on Facebook in 2019. On average, people from across the planet spend 58 minutes per day on Facebook.
So what do these users do at this time?
· Viewing 8 billion videos on Facebook feed every day
· 300 million Daily picture uploads on the platform
· 1.4 billion + of the users are active on the platform every day.
Except for Facebook, there are a number of other platforms that dominate the concept of Social Media. These being:
- YouTube where more than 1.5 billion users use the platform to view videos of their favourite creators every day (Wendy, 2020)
- Instagram where every second, users upload 870 Instagram photos that make startling 49,380 photographs in a minute (Wendy, 2020)
- Twitter where there are over 1.3 billion users registered, of whom 80% mention some of the other brands in their tweets to gain traction (Wendy, 2020)
- Snapchat where 3.5 billion snaps are being created every day
How is Social Media used in Politics?
Although people use social media for fun, business or sometimes even to show off, it is also used in politics. An article by Wharton University (2020) claims that social media has changed the game when it comes to politics, allowing incumbents and newcomers alike to speak directly to constituents on everything from policy to what they had for lunch.
Barack Obama was the first presidential candidate to use the medium of social media, which was still imperfect during his 2008 bid, and Donald Trump takes to Twitter almost every day to express himself without the filter of traditional media.
Quoting Wharton marketing professor Pinar Yildirim he said that if an individual looks at the way that politicians communicate today, it is very different than the way that they used to communicate five or ten years ago. Yildirim also said that they would speak through the official speakers or they would be on TV. They would be in print or official online newspapers. Today, they are communicating through places like Twitter and Facebook. He concluded by asking a question, why are they doing that? Is there any benefit to communicating on channels like Twitter?”
In his research to answer the previously stated questions, Yildirim noted that you do not have to have the big money, big fundraisers, big supporters to be able to communicate on social media with your constituency and tell the people about what your ideas are for the future. Yildirim also argued that the politician can tell the people about who he/she is, what his values are.
References:
Clement, 2020. Daily Social Media Usage Worldwide | Statista. Statista. Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/433871/daily-social-media-usage-worldwide/
Dean, 2020. How Many People Use Social Media In 2020? (65+ Statistics). Backlinko. Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://backlinko.com/social-media-users
Dollarhide, 2020. Social Media. Investopedia. Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/social-media.asp
Rouse, 2020. What Is Social Media?. WhatIs.com. Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/social-media
Wendy, 2020. How Much Time Do People Spend On Social Media (11 Insights) | Blog | Whatagraph. Whatagraph.com. Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://whatagraph.com/blog/articles/how-much-time-do-people-spend-on-social-media
Wharton University, 2020. How Social Media Is Shaping Political Campaigns — Knowledge@Wharton. Knowledge@Wharton. Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/how-social-media-is-shaping-political-campaigns/
