Social Networking Sites

Society practically lives on social media nowadays. It's the main form of communication between one another, unfortunately. People look at their phones more than the environment around them and they interact with others via social media instead of actually talking to someone one on one. I can't tell if it's fascinating or scary, but one thing's for sure- social media and social networking sites are taking over!

Facebook is, without a doubt, the most popular social networking site operating today. With over 1.2 billion users, Facebook continues to grow. People use Facebook to interact with the world around them, literally. The site broadcasts news and trending topics to keep users up to date with current events.

Like Facebook, Twitter also leaves users in-the-know about trending topics. The site even customizes the trending topics by naming it "Trends for you". Both Facebook and Twitter allow people to leave hashtags on their posts so that others may look through the tag to read more about the topic. One thing that's differs between these two social media platforms is the length of the posts. Twitter only allows users to have posts 140 characters long, whereas people are able to post paragraphs of text on their Facebook posts. As far as privacy settings go, Facebook's privacy settings are more complex whereas Twitter's privacy settings are simply to have one's tweets public or private.

YouTube is a little different from Facebook and Twitter. Unlike posts or tweets to express one's self, people express their creativity and ideas through videos. One can subscribe to their favorite content creators and upload as many videos as they want, whenever they want. Creators are also able to use hashtags for their videos, so their content is together with similar content users may search. They can also create playlists to further narrow down and filter their video uploads to make the viewer's search easier.

Although Facebook and LinkedIn are both popular social networking sites that connect people, the main difference is that LinkedIn is more of a professional platform. The site is mainly used to connect with employers, recruiters, or companies in hopes that the user will find a job. The connections, interactions, and posts aren't as casual as Facebook since users like to keep it professional on the site. As far as job hunting goes, I'd say that LinkedIn is the most helpful of the four social networking sites discussed, to look for a job. LinkedIn exercises privacy in means that users are able to make themselves anonymous when looking through the profiles of others as well as decide on how much of their profile they'd like to make public.