With the rise of social media based articles on GLBrain, I felt the need to create a GLOpinion that will stand here as a base for everything social media related.
There's almost no person in the world with Internet connection who is not connected to some social media. There are so many of them now and their numbers are growing constantly.
Definition of social media
Social media are computer-mediated tools that allow people or companies to create, share, or exchange information, career interests, ideas, and pictures/videos in virtual communities and networks.
For this GLOpinion, I'll present to you the list of the most popular social media networks in the world.
Most of us already know that Facebook is the top social network on the web. It's a thriving beast of a social networking site on the web with over 1.59 billions monthly active users as of December 2015 and over one billion that log on daily (according to Facebook itself). Statista shows that Facebook Messenger is also the second most popular messaging app behind WhatsApp. After failing to acquire Snapchat in 2013, Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 so that it could be the one that was one top of instant messaging.
Twitter is known as the real-time, public microblogging network where news breaks first. Most users loved it for its iconic 140-character limit and unfiltered feed that showed them absolutely everything. Twitter has changed dramatically over the years, and today it's criticized a lot for going the way of looking and functioning almost exactly like Facebook.
LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. Anyone who needs to make connections to advance their careers should be on LinkedIn. Profiles are designed to look sort of like extremely detailed resumes, with sections for work experience, education, volunteer work, certifications, awards and all sorts of other relevant work-related information. Users can promote themselves and their businesses by making connections with other professionals, interacting in group discussions, posting job ads, applying to jobs, publishing articles to LinkedIn pulse and so much more.
Google+
Making its debut in the early summer of 2011, Google+ became the fastest growing social network the web has ever seen. After failing a couple times already with Google Buzz and Google Wave, the search giant finally succeeded at creating something that stuck... kind of. Nobody really needed another Facebook clone, so Google+ had always been widely criticized for being a social network that nobody really used.
YouTube
Where does everyone go to watch or share video content online? It's obviously YouTube. After Google, YouTube is the second largest search engine. Despite being owned by Google, YouTube can still be recognized as a separate social network all on its own as the premiere place online to go to watch videos on every topic under the sun and upload your own as well. From music videos and movies, to personal vlogs and independent films, YouTube has it all.
Instagram has grown to be one of the most popular social networks for photo sharing that the mobile web has ever seen. It's the ultimate social network for sharing real-time photos and short videos while on the go. Now it's even a leading advertising platform for brands too.
Pinterest has become a major player both in social networking and in the search world, proving just how important visual content has become on the web. As the fastest standalone site ever to reach 10 million monthly unique visits, Pinterest's beautiful and intuitive pinboard-style platform is one of the most enticing and useful resource for collecting the best images that can be categorized into separate boards. Pinterest is also growing to become a huge influencer in social shopping, now featuring "Buy" buttons right on pins of products sold by some retailers.
Tumblr
Tumblr is an extremely popular social blogging platform that's heavily used by teens and young adults. Like Pinterest, it's best known for sharing visual content. Users can customize their blog theme, create blog posts in all sorts of different types of content formats, follow other users to see content in their dashboard feed and be followed back. Reblogging and liking posts is a popular way to interact. If you post great content, you could end up with thousands of reblogs and likes depending on how far it gets pushed out into the Tumblr community.
Vine
Vine is a mobile video sharing app owned by Twitter, and boy is it ever entertaining! If you don't have the attention span to watch a full YouTube video, then you'll love Vine. One of the most convenient things about Vine is that its videos can be directly embedded inline on Twitter when shared through a tweet. They can also be embedded on a website. Videos play on autoloop and are limited to a maximum of six seconds, but that doesn't stop it from being such a powerful social network.
Snapchat
Snapchat is a social networking app that thrives on instant messaging and is totally mobile-based. It's one of the fastest growing apps out there, building its popularity on the idea of self-destructing "snaps." You can send a photo or short video as a message (a snap) to a friend, which automatically disappears a few seconds after they've viewed it. Kids love this app because it takes the pressure off of having to share something with everyone like they would on traditional social networks.
There are many more out there, these are just some of the most popular ones.
Stay tuned for many updates and follow-up articles in the future.
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