SNSs provide users with easy access to a wide variety of content, convenient sharing, and voluntary anonymity that builds trust. It is a key tool for effective advertising, informing, and networking, and is revolutionizing the way information is distributed in the modern world.
These coupons, which allow you to purchase a product at a much lower price than the market price, are conditional scalpers that offer a significant discount when a certain number of purchases are made. The sites that sell these coupons are characterized by their ability to quickly spread the word through the power of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Social Network Services (SNS) are not just for selling products, but also for amplifying social, political, or everyday news to create a huge ripple effect. It’s one of the most popular keywords in news and articles these days, so it’s a term that most people, not just young people, have heard of at least once, but what exactly is it?
“Social Network Service” (SNS) is an online platform that allows users to create and strengthen social relationships through free communication, information sharing, and networking. Today, most SNSs are web-based services that provide a means for users to communicate with each other via email or instant messengers in addition to the web. SNSs are often used interchangeably with social media, but as a category, they should be considered a type of social media, along with blogs, wikis, UCCs, microblogs, etc.”
This is Wikipedia’s definition of a social network service. At first glance, they seem to be no different from online services such as blogs and personal homepages, but what are the characteristics that distinguish SNSs from previous services and make them a separate category from other online services?
First, SNS makes it easy to access various contents. In a traditional blog, each person has a separate space to post content, so to see someone’s post, you have to go to their personal blog and click on the post. Social networks like Facebook, on the other hand, have a shared space called the “newsfeed” where all the posts from everyone you’ve set up to receive posts from are organized in one place, so you can keep track of all the content in one place. It may seem like a small step to click a few times to get to a post, but think about it. There’s a difference between going to the blogs of 10 of your online friends and seeing their posts one by one on their own personalized boards, and just scrolling through them on a single screen, with your fingers twitching as you scroll. Moreover, in today’s multimedia age, content comes in many forms, not just text, but also photos, videos, sounds, and more. SNSs aggregate this multimodal content into a single place called the newsfeed, which creates a sense of continuity in the reader’s experience.
In addition, social media newsfeeds provide a personalized experience. By identifying the types of content users like or view frequently and prioritizing posts related to them, users are more likely to spend more time and attention on the platform. This increases user satisfaction while also providing advertisers with better targeting opportunities, which ultimately increases the profitability of the social platform.
Second, social media makes it easy to share content. It’s not uncommon to see posts about helping the poor in Somalia, or advocating for children with life-threatening birth defects, or just plain funny posts full of humor and wit circulating widely. They’re shared by hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of people. This is an amazing phenomenon that is hard to find in traditional online services. Users share the same post, either verbatim or with their own comments, creating a chain reaction that starts somewhere and eventually creates a ripple effect that spans countries. Many of these posts are dated within a few days. The ease of sharing on social media is what enables this terrifying trend. On social media, you can see someone else’s post and simply hit the “share” button to share it and have it appear in your friends’ newsfeeds. It’s only a small difference from the cumbersome task of copying and pasting text and downloading and re-uploading photos, but as you can see from the previous paragraph, subtle differences in convenience can make a huge difference. This ease of sharing is at the root of social media’s terrifying pervasiveness, making it a great platform for social commerce, games, and other ad-supported businesses.
It’s also worth noting that social sharing isn’t just for personal use. Businesses, non-profit organizations, and even government agencies use the power of social media to promote and campaign. Whether it’s viral marketing of a product, raising awareness of a social issue, or quickly communicating information during an emergency, the sharing capabilities of social media are widely used for a variety of purposes. This goes beyond mere ease of use, and is an important factor in revolutionizing the information distribution structure of modern society.
Third, SNSs are anonymous. We often fill out our Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp accounts with not only information about our favorite books, favorite movies, and favorite celebrities, but also a lot of personal information, such as our name, phone number, where we live, where we’re from, and where we go to school. Of course, other internet sites ask for basic user information, but it’s only to verify your identity to prevent identity theft or duplicate sign-ups, and the information is strictly limited after signing up. However, in the case of SNSs, there is no strict identity verification process, so people can sign up even if they lie about their personal information, and people voluntarily reveal their identity. This is the voluntary anonymity of SNS. The reason for this paradoxical situation where people willingly reveal information about themselves when it’s not necessary is simple. In most cases, your social media account is your online image, an extension of who you are in the real world and an extension of your offline networking. This means that revealing information like your name or where you’re from on your social media accounts is done for the same reasons you would share such information with people in your immediate vicinity offline: the same psychology that drives people to use their hometown or high school to create and strengthen connections based on commonalities also works online.
This voluntary anonymity contributes to a user’s trustworthiness. Communication based on real names and real information gives the other person a sense of trust, which is what makes social media so popular for formal purposes like business. In fact, many companies use social media to communicate with their customers, and customers rely on their official social media accounts for reliable information. This is playing an important role in making social media more than just a communication tool between individuals, but a trust-based information distribution platform.
The ease of contact, ease of sharing, and voluntary anonymity of content are the characteristics that distinguish “social” network services from other traditional network services. These features have made it much easier to identify online human networks than in the past. This has made it possible to advertise more effectively to the right audience, and users can efficiently socialize and exchange information with people who have something in common with them. However, these powerful online networks are not the only bright side of social media. There is also a clear downside to advertising, which can be both beneficial in terms of delivering information to the target audience and annoying in terms of unwanted and excessive notifications. As with any development, there are two sides to every story, and the same goes for the proliferation of social media, so we should always keep in mind to be wise users.
