Essay on INTERNET AS SOCIAL MEDIA: CONNECTIVITY AND IMMEDIACY
The essence of each social platform is to bring together people in accordance with their interests, as well as to give them the opportunity to maintain virtual contact with their friends and acquaintances, to run public debate and share content. Today, one of the most popular social networks is Twitter, which is a special microblogging service for exchanging messages of no more than 140 characters. In other words, it is an on-line diary which implements a live broadcast of visitors’ thoughts in a shortened version, i.e. each post is limited in the size of its content. In the fast paced world of information satiety, this limitation immediately grew into an advantage when brevity allows concentrating only on the essentials. Below, we will discuss which features and benefits of Twitter functioning interested us most during the study.
First of all, it should be noted that Twitter is used not only to communicate, but also to find interesting resources and people. There is a long list of benefits of the Internet service, and here are some of them that we have noted in particular:
– Getting the information of interest. One can get news from friends in their posts or communicating with them. Users write completely different posts and one can fave only the most interesting ones.
– User can place a link to one’s resource from the main page of the account. The posted links are indexed by search engines, and it is an additional back.
– Attracting new visitors. Many people use Twitter as a tool to attract new visitors to their websites or blogs by posting brief messages about updates.
As for the last undisputed advantage, we are convinced that microblogging service implements more dynamic relationships with readers compared to traditional blogging. Thus, monitoring showed that many bloggers redirecting visitors to Twitter have a more productive relationship with them, rather than in their main blog. Indeed, Twitter excellently performs the function of RSS feeds, therefore, as Maclean et al. (2013) research shows, many people are watching the updates of their interest namely with its help. As a result, many businesses use Twitter as a marketing tool, effectively complementing the main company website, because it can be used to involve socially active target audience to the corporate website, as well as significantly improve the functionality of interaction with partners through direct stakeholder feedback (Maclean et al., 2013, p. 296; Burton & Soboleva, 2011, p.493). On the other hand, this attracted many banal spammers, but in our subjective view, readers themselves take care of them easily outlining them on the background of true twitters.
Moreover, Twitter is a unique source of information about what is happening in the world updated in real time (Garfield, 2010). Therefore, today, the analysis of the published posts flow allows researchers to catch a lot of social attitudes. In particular, it seems interesting that the percentage of Twitter references to a candidate in elections to the Congress helped scientists at the University of Indiana to correctly predict the winner in 404 of 406 cases (DiGrazia et al., 2013, e79449). Similar work on the content of the tweets may well become, if not a substitute, a reliable alternative to expensive polls, especially with regard to local elections which rarely attract the attention of specialists in the polls and the national media. Furthermore, such a campaign is relevant for the analysis of public attitudes in countries where journalists and sociologists are actively suppressed, or citizens are afraid to answer questions over the phone, but they have free access to the Internet.
In addition, with the growing popularity of social networking, monitoring of the information accumulating in the network is an integral part of doing business. Nowadays, corporate platform of a statistical analysis allows carrying out an automatic monitoring of tweets in real time, as well as setting up automatic notification of emerging “alarms” such as negative reviews about products or consumer complaints (Burton & Soboleva, 2011, p.495). It helps to quickly and accurately determine the reaction of people to the company’s actions. Microblogging on the Twitter platform has also become an important tool for the exchange of ideas and different points of view on the state of the stock market. For example, in a study of 250,000 Twitter posts economists from Munich Technical University have shown that moods present in similar messages from Twitter develop similarly in the stock market, and moreover, they are sometimes one day ahead of them (Burton & Soboleva, 2011, p.496).
Thus, the high value of data obtained from Twitter does not need to be proved. Through their analysis, experts may successfully predict fluctuations in the exchange rates, observe the spread of epidemics and natural disasters, evaluate politicians’ perspectives and the effectiveness of television advertising, as well as the development of social moods in general. Here, we see one aspect as particularly promising: these data allow a good accuracy in determining both what is happening now and what should be expected in the nearest future. This, in our opinion, is the main advantage of content analysis of Twitter as one of the most dynamic and functional social networks.
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