M1

M1 Unit 43 Explain Opportunities provided by Social Media to Individuals

Millennials

16-25 years old people tend to use Facebook more than any other generation (According to Pew Research Center).

This audience uses the majority of the features of Facebook, such as adding friends, sharing, instant messenger and so on. All these tools allow people the opportunity to stay in contact with hundreds of people; with 1.71 Billion active users in 2016 and growing rapidly. In everyday life it's hard to physically see all your friends as often.

With the sharing and like tool you can subtly let your friends know what you're into at the moment, and that information will be put on the feed of your friends. This feature is used all the time and is the key for the reason Facebook is so popular. Its also good for business because people mostly like or share companies and products.

Facebook can also be used to create groups so that friends can organise events and communicate between a specific group of friends. This makes communication a lot easier for friends that are scattered around the world and telling multiple people one thing. This is highly appealing for people who are in a class together and need to communicate as one.

Discord is a application is fairly new and has skyrocketed into popularity with people on PC mainly gamers. It's a simple tool that allows people to create there own free servers that can be connected through the desktop app or the website. Discord is perfect for free group chats text and connecting people together. The app can have an astonishing 1000 users using voice chat at once.

Children

Children love social media and use it more than they may realize. This is due to websites like club Penguin and Poptropica. These sites are games, but have all the functionalities adding friends and talking live. The community can also play games against each other and so on.

Using Club Penguin as an example, this platform is excellent at letting friends meeting up in a virtual world and have the capability to play games, and interact together. The best part about this is that it's based on a website means you can go online on any PC. For kids this is an ideal time killer, for free time. Is fun and simple concept that kids can enjoy.

Older People

Older is Wiser is a website with lots of functions all located in one place. But these functions are all aimed at the interest of older people, for example "Retirement planning, e-learning and advice" it gives this demographic the opportunity to access information they may otherwise have to travel to towns and cities to acquire.

The site is mainly a forum where users can get to gather and comment and vote on different topics, that are mainly made by the community, and others made by the owners of the website. It's a hub for everyday people to get a voice and ask questions, tell people their opinions and facts. Then from there users can give feed back and right comments.

People with Disabilities

people who have a vision problem or has aspergers websites like YouTube, are to crowded and cluttered. Which makes it hard for them to use, that's why 3rd party developers have come up with websites which are a clean and simple to use version of YouTube.

For example Accessible YouTube has tools and features that YouTube themselves don't have for example text to speech. This website with is customizability allows this access one of the biggest sohal platforms of all time.

Links

http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/08/19/the-demographics-of-social-media-users/

http://www.olderiswiser.com/

http://cs.unc.edu/~gb/Accessible-YouTube/index.html