The
Social Networking services – Facebook et al
The internet is now ruled by social networking. It is no more a secret that it is the youth who use the services most. Parents don’t have a say in how their children interact with others anymore. Gone are the days when children were told not to mingle with certain types of kids. These days children actually choose who they want and communicate in all sorts of ways with them. The services offered by the social networking sites such as Facebook and the others attract the young more than the old. However this puts the youth in the path of all kinds of information that has far reaching effects on them now and in the future. As elders in the society it is our duty to educate the young ones so that they would know their ways around the social networking services and use them to their benefit rather than their detriment. This article seeks to shed a little light on the numerous productive uses of the social networking services.
Social
Networking services were not built for the negative reasons some associate with
them today. It is the unflinching desire of mankind to ‘destroy all things good’ that has made our social networks get a
bad name. Facebook and Twitter have their mission statements as follows:
Facebook:
to give people the power to
share and make the world more open and connected.
Twitter: to
instantly connect people everywhere to what‘s most important to them
It is very clear the creators of these services
have very positive purposes for their actions. However we should understand
that every good thing has got a negative side too and it is how the negative
side is managed that makes the difference. I believe that if we are able to
harness the goodies of social networking, the negative sides would not matter a
lot. Let us look at ways in which social networking services come in handy.
Business
Although this is yet to fully gain grounds in the
country, the potential is too massive to be ignored by any serious minded
businessman or corporate firm. Facebook and Twitter alone gives one instant
access to a huge number of customers. The only thing left is how to capture
their imagination. For starters every company should just have a presence on both
Facebook and Twitter so that news and other business information can be posted
there. Those who have already done this are reaping the benefits big time. TV3,
Viasat 1, Expresso, Joy FM, Airtel and
the others can attest to that. The youth can take advantage of this platform to
do advertisement. They can advertise their small businesses and the response
will be huge.
Event organisation
Organisation of events has never been easy;
weddings, birthday parties and others are all organised on Facebook without any
sweat. The setup is simple, one just needs to enter the event name,
description, venue, time period and invite friends as guest. The invited
friends can then invite other friends and they can also invite other friends on
and on like that. There is even a space for invited guests to share their views
before and during the event.
Groups
It is now a common place to see groups like Sekondi
College Students Association, St. Johns School, Youth Volunteers Without
Frontiers (YVWF), Just for Laughs and others. The group feature on Facebook
serves as a platform for members to engage in the discussion of matters
relevant to only themselves. Group members can even share pictures about group
activities. This feature can be used by youth groups to promote their
activities and attract more members.
Expression of views
Facebook does not really do justice to the idea of
people expressing their views because one needs to be a friend of someone to
see what they are saying on their walls; this is where Twitter comes in handy.
On twitter users start discussions by adding a hash (#) tag before a keyword
and all other users interested in the topic can join by using the same tag, it
then becomes a trend. Users don’t need to know those contributing to that trend.
One of the popular trends in Ghana is ‘#233moments’, where users talk about
what they are doing at 2:33am/pm every day and it is really interesting. The emergence
of a particular trend is usually influenced by events around the world. The
just ended African Cup of Nations had a hash tag like ‘#AFCON2012’ so anyone
who wanted to say something about the tournament had to add the hash tag to
their tweet and it will be seen by all those interested. The recent power outages
have given birth to #ECG and there is a massive number of users contributing on
daily basis. There are a lot of professionals and opinion leaders on twitter
that one can follow to learn more from. Below is a list that will interest
readers a lot:
Top
10 most influencial Ghanaians on Twitter
1.
@RodneyQuarcoo
2.
@MacJordan
3.
@ameyaw112
4.
@TweetGhana
5.
@djkobbie
6.
@Mameyaa
7.
@Abocco
8.
@ghanablogger
9.
@niyyie
10. @IheartAccra
Top
10 most followed Ghanaians on Twitter
1.
@Tuffour
2.
@ReggieRockstone
3.
@GhanaMusic
4.
@GhanaMixTapes
5.
@TMouganie
6.
@ameyaw112
7.
@EducatingAfrica
8.
@djkobbie
9.
@Mameyaa
10. @RodneyQuarcoo
Job seeking
Job seekers now have another avenue to display
their competence for employers to see without any hassle. This is where
LinkedIn reigns supreme. On LinkedIn profiles are just like Curriculum Vitae
(CV). The more academic and work information a user pumps in there the better
the person’s chance of being spotted by employers. There is a great of
professionalism on LinkedIn too. Now corporate bodies are all making their
presence on LinkedIn so that they can attract the best talents out there. One
can advertise their skills and competence on twitter too but it does not come
any close to LinkedIn.
Youtube
Youtube was added because of its popularity among
the youth. Youtube is primarily a video sharing website where users can upload
and watch videos of all genres. This is where our youth have a lot to learn from.
There are lot of video tutorials on almost every subject in the world. All one
needs to do is to search with the appropriate keywords and the videos will just
flow. There are a lot of ‘How To’ videos that show the processes for doing
certain things that hitherto could be done by only experts. Some popular videos
include
·
How to punch down an RJ-45 keystone
with an impact tool (networking)
·
How to make fresh yogurt at home
·
How to tie a tie
·
How to design a computer network
Users can also install browser add-ons such ‘ant
downloader’ to download the videos from websites and view them any convenient
time.
Bottom line
The main aim of this article is to expose people
to the good things of social networking service so that it overshadows all the
negative publicity some associate with them. We must embrace this new technology
and use it positively. My taxonomy of the uses of the service is not
exhaustive; there are a lot of other useful things that can be derived from
such services out there but at least this gives readers an idea about their
usefulness.
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