Social Media

Overview
Social Media can be defined as websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking. Some commonly known social media sites being: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, or Linkedin.

What is social media?
Social media was made for the purpose of building an online community. These sites allow for communication between users, collaboration, content sharing, and input from other users. A lot of these sites allow users to create profiles. These profiles will give other users access to information about themselves. Social media users will upload images, birthdate, family, relationship status, and more. Creating these profiles allows for users to keep in touch with friends and family by sharing updates, pictures, and messages.

Users can also keep their information private only allowing their friends or friends of friends to view their information. Some social media sites are used for blogging or making professional connections. Sites such as Twitter allow for minimal blogging that can be quickly shared with your followers. While websites like Linkedin allow users to create professional profiles that present information such as their resume, and in-depth educational experience. Although most internet resources include a social aspect in today’s age the sole purpose of the website must be for communication/community building to be considered a social media site.

How social media allows for Social Networking
Social Networking is the use of social media sites to make connections with a wide variety of people. A user may connect with friends, family, employers, customers, or educators. Social networking can take place for both business and personal purposes.

Social networking both online and in real life is similar and for the same purposes. You do this to gain more information on business or people you are interested in, or simply just to meet new people or to keep in touch. How we do this virtually is through social media sites which make it easy for users to connect, communicate, and build connections.

Issues with Social Media Platforms
User misrepresentation

Those who use social media platforms often compare themselves to other users on social media. Often, people choose to only display a very positive representation of their lives to compensate for an inadequacy they feel from seeing other users' posts on social media. When it looks like others have it better, this can hurt users own self-representation. Social media's influence on the individual level is strong. Some may choose to create a false online persona to keep details about their lives private, to make it seem like their life and who they are is different from actuality or to even invade the privacy of others. On social media, users seem to balance information they keep private and information they want public via their online representation of themselves (Enli, 2012).

Information privacy

There is an abundance of information shared on social media by users. Companies can use this information via cookies to try and target users for financial gain. Users are becoming increasingly concerned with the degree of data tracking that social media platforms are using. For instance, users are just learning that there is potential for Facebook to use microphone data to create targeted ads for users. There is speculation whether or not this is true, however.