What is Social Media(to me)?
Social media is before anything else a tool. Like any good tool it can be used in multiple ways for various outcomes. This tool is so important to me currently because I am interning as Director of Social Media for Juniata College’s Esports team. Check us out on twitter and instagram by the way. The team is still young so the social media accounts have become my child essentially as the creation of them is something I have been involved with for every step. Social media is something people use to communicate and advertise. Communication is something that has evolved with the growth of social media. The way we communicate has changed at a faster rate due to how quickly word passes on social media. Trends can last for months or just days thanks to how fast it updates. It is fascinating to me how quickly something stop being cool or popular these days. Memes are the best example of this, with how they spring up and then fade overnight. I think social media has accelerated language changes and occupies our thoughts more and more. I’m waiting for the day that social media is mandatory, it already is considered socially odd to not have certain forms of social media. Imagine what it would be like if it was required by governments to have various social media accounts.
To me social media is something that is required to stay connected to the world these days. The stream of information might not be healthy, but without it one’s knowledge can be crippled. To use social media effectively you have to learn how to limit how much you consume each day, and whether what you are consuming is negative or positive. I personally use social media mostly for my internship. Specifically twitter and facebook are two forms that I previously did not use regularly. I find advertising and maintaining a following through social media the most interesting. Utilizing it and formatting posts in a way to reach and catch the attention of the maximum number of people. The way word choice interacts with supplemental images, or in the case of twitters horrible word count images explaining the rest of the information.
