In 2018, there are several
prominent social media websites that seem to have been created for purpose of
promoting users’ personal interests or social interaction between communities
of users. For example, Pinterest, a popular image sharing website that is
frequently used as a sort of online collage or bulletin board for showcasing
individual users’ favorite topics, recipes, quotes, and other illustrations
that they might be interested in, is best suited for personal use. Since
Pinterest users cannot really converse with each other on any message boards
(even though users can follow each other’s profiles instead),Pinterest just
basically functions as a personal online storage space for capturing tidbits of
information about what users’ personal interests are through images. Businesses
are not known to openly advertise their own products on Pinterest, especially
since they would not have any space to type any writing about their businesses
on Pinterest. Reddit, like Pinterest, is also another social media website that
seems to function as a purely personal social media website. Reddit, which
bills itself as the “front page of the Internet”, is used by individual users
who communicate with each other by writing posts back and forth to each other
on an infinite amount of topics. Both Reddit and Pinterest honor the concept of
protecting users’ privacy by allowing them to assume anonymous identities so
that their right to freedom of expression and speech is protected. Generally,
businesses do not often publicly advertise on Reddit, and, from what I have
seen, a lot of users seem to even resent to idea of businesses using Reddit as
platform to promote their companies.
Unlike Pinterest and Reddit, which
seem to be used more for personal purposes, LinkedIn is used almost exclusively
as a job networking website for perspective job applicants and for businesses
to promote their products and services. As a LinkedIn user myself, I know that
LinkedIn also allows people to write personal articles about topics that they
wish to reach a broader audience with, but those topics are almost always
connected to the job market on some fashion or another. LinkedIn is also great
job networking website because users can also post their resumes and awards and
certificate of achievement on the website, which allows for possibility of
prospective employers and friend connections being able to contact them and
look at their profiles more easily. Even though there are groups that people
can join to discuss their personal interests, those groups still ultimately
exist because job seekers and workers in general want to show they are
desirable candidates because they appear to be well-rounded individuals, which
many companies claim to seek. In addition, since people also use their full,
real names on LinkedIn, people are much more guarded about sharing their
personal opinions about non-business related topics on LinkedIn. For these
reasons, LinkedIn will likely remain a website that is mostly using of job
networking and promoting businesses.
In
addition, it is important to remember that other social media platforms are
equally as useful for personal use as well as business use. Based on my
personal experience with (and based on
what I have read about these particular social media websites) Twitter,
Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube seem to fit into this category. Twitter can
used by individual users to send various tweets (short messages) to other
Twitter users to display commentaries about random topics throughout the day,
including topics such as politics, faith, going out to new restaurants, and
much more. Twitter can also by used by companies and business owners to promote
special sales, products, and coupons for their customers. Facebook, since it
combines the ability to display typed text and illustrations/photos, can be
just as valuable for businesses to communicate with and advertise to potential
customers as it is for allowing people an online social space to express their
opinions and have debates with other users, including family, friends, and colleagues.
Instagram, although it is typically used as purely personal social platform
where users can upload there own photos or images from the Internet, can be
used to promote businesses if those businesses pay popular Instagram users to
display photos of themselves using those companies’ products. YouTube can also
be effectively used as a social media
website where people post homemade videos (and non-homemade videos) and comment anonymously
while interacting with follow users in the comments sections. Businesses often
pay YouTube to run commercials that users must either watch or skip before they
are able to watch the videos that they originally wanted to see.
