Week 12: Diffusion of Innovations and Social Media

Social media is a digital tool in which users share thoughts, pictures, information, and ideas to a group of people they choose to be friends with or people who follow them. Popular sites include: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Within social media, there is an audience. This audience is called an imagined audience, or people perceived to be receiving the information or message that you post. When we post on social media, we imagine that all of our friends or followers are going to read what we have to say, but in reality, that is not always the case.

Social media allows us to pick and choose what we see; there is no force making us read everything posted on social media sites. In addition, there is a wide variety of information posted on social media, and not all of it catches the eye of social media users. In fact, the average engagement rate for a Facebook post is 3.6%, which is very low (Newberry, 2019). The reason for low engagement is because users seek out posts that interest them.

The way we communicate is constantly changing; one reason why is because of social media. People follow their close friends and family on social media, but they also follow their acquaintances and people with mutual friends. Strong ties on social media relates to the people closest to us. We communicate frequently with these people. Weak ties relates to people we do not have a close communicative relationship with. Communication is not frequent, however, we still might interact with them. Social media allows us to bring both of those ties together in order to form an entire world full of different forms of communication.

Media richness theory refers to the evaluation of communication over a variety of mediums. This theory plays a large role in social media and relationship quality. Mediums involved in media richness theory can stem from interacting with a photo to face to face communication. Social media allows for a baseline form of communication, whether that is liking an image or a post. It can further lead into texting/emailing, video-calling, and eventually reach face to face communication.

Social media brings so many people together and forms many kinds of relationships. College students rely on Facebook to find a roommate, people bond on Twitter over musicians and political discussion, and we check Instagram to see what adventures our peers are currently on. It allows us to feel power behind the messages we release and allows for conversations about ultimately anything. Communication is only going to grow because of social media.

References

Newberry, C. (2019, November 4). 33 Facebook Stats Marketers That Matter to Marketers in 2020. Retrieved November 13, 2020, from https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-statistics/