Introduction
Social connections are the relationships that bond us together. Think about what happens when you meet someone new. You ask where they work, where they grew up, where they went to school. Ultimately, you realize that your childhood friend was in this guy's fraternity in college. Even though you've never met before, you're both part of the same social network; a friend of a friend.
The social network could be a social structure that maps out the relationships between individuals. Technically, we all belong to one giant social network, but we also belong to smaller, tighter social networks defined by our families, our friends, where we live, where we work, where we went to school, our hobbies and interests and much more.
Social Network
Social Network Service Definition and Overview
A social networking service or SNS (sometimes called a social networking site) is an online platform such as TikTok, Instagram and Twitter which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people that share similar personal or career interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections.
Social networking services vary in format and the number of features. They can incorporate a range of new information and communication tools, operating on desktops/laptops, on mobile devices such as tablet computers and on smartphones. They may feature digital photo/video sharing and diary entries online (blogging).
Social Networking service can also be defined as websites or an application that facilitate the building of a network of contacts in order to exchange various types of contents online. Social networking sites provide a space for interaction to continue beyond in-person interactions. These computer mediated interactions link members of various networks and may help to both maintain and develop new social and professional relationships.
Social-networking sites make “invisible social networks visible" by allowing us to see (with pictures and links) who our friends are, who our friends' friends are, and who our friends' friends' friends are - all in an easy-to-use interface. When you create profile on a social-networking site, you literally put yourself on the social-networking map, which you can use the website to:
- Look up old friends or make new ones
- Share music, photos and videos
- Join groups based on interests such as politics, hobbies or favourite TV shows
- Find jobs or love, or browse for the weirdest profile picture 🙂
Subsequently, a recent attempt at providing a clear definition reviewed the prominent literature in the social networking sites and identified four commonalities unique to recent social networking services:
- Social networking services are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications
- User-generated content (UGC), such as user-submitted digital photos, text posts, "tagging", online comments, and diary-style "web logs" (blogs), is the lifeblood of the SNS organism,
- Users create service-specific profiles for the site or app that are designed and maintained by the SNS organization, and
- Social networking services facilitate the development of social networks online by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.
Social Network Logos
While in-person social networking, such as gathering in a village market to talk about events has existed since the earliest development of towns, the web enables people to connect with others who live in different locations, ranging from across a town, region, country to across the globe.
Your relationship to others in the social network can be measured by degrees of separation. Your friend is one degree of separation away from you. Your friend's friend is two degrees of separation away from you, and so on.
If you sat down with a pen and paper, it would be difficult to map out all the people with whom you're connected and all the people with whom they're connected. That's why social-networking services are so powerful.
When e-mail, Internet Messaging IM apps, mobile computers, smartphones, and the Internet work together, they create something called Networked Individualism. Networked individualism is the idea that we switch back and forth between many different social networks based on the particular social capital we're seeking, whether it's advice on which college to attend, information on some product that we want to buy, or a collaborator on a work project.
Wireless technology is key to networked individualism. Smartphones and mobile computers give us greater mobility and connectivity than ever before. We can go and be wherever we want, yet we're always available online.
How Social Sites/Service Work?
The Internet has proven to be a powerful tool for searching out and engaging in various forms of social networking. But the real leap forward came with the launch of kind of a websites called social-networking sites, whose exclusive purpose is to build and maintain social networks.
Below, we are going to explain how exactly social-networking sites work.
Setting up and Using Social Network Accounts
Basically, there are three (3) basic steps to using all social-networking services, which include:
- Create and post a personal profile
- Search the network for existing contacts or browse for new ones
- Add contacts to your network
Creating an Individuals/Personal Profile
To join any social-networking site, you'll first be asked to create a login name and password. Some may require you to provide additional information. Once you're done with that, you have become a member on that social networking site, and you'll be asked to fill out some basic personal information, such as name, gender, age, location, hobbies/interests, etc. A lot of social networking services also allow you to upload a photo of yourself. This information is used to build basic profile of you.
Facebook Sign-up Page
Sometimes, it will allow you to further personalize your profile, either by answering more detailed questions, filling out short descriptions of yourself and your interests, or by uploading media files like photos or short video. Some social-networking sites allow you to change the way the profile page looks to make it even more unique.
There are now more than 150 active social-networking sites, and each one has a slightly different process for creating a profile. However, the profile's function is always the same. It's the image of yourself that you present to the online world. This, of course, has its advantages and disadvantages.
The advantage is that online profiles give us a chance to put our best foot forward and choose to share only the parts of our lives that are the most interesting. The disadvantage of it is that a visitor to your profile could "label" you as a one-dimensional figure; a rock music fan, a sports fanatic, a depressed poet, instead of a whole person.
On most occasion, you can control who can view your full profile by making it to be private, public or something in between. On some sites, only "friends," or people who you've added to your network can see all the information on your profile, while others can only see your photo and some basic stats like your age and location.
Finding and Making Connections
There are three ways to find friends and make connections on social-networking sites:
- Invite your offline friends to join the service/site.
- Search for friends who are already members on that platform.
- Find interesting people and ask them to join their connections.
Social-networking sites allow you to send mails inviting friends to join the Website and automatically become part of your online social network. Some social-networking sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn, allow you to upload your address book from Webmail accounts such as Gmail or Yahoomail! and send invites to all your contacts at once.
You can also make connections by searching the social-networking site for people you know, who are already members. Search capabilities differ from site to site, but some ways to search for friends are by:
- the person's name, screen name or e-mail address
- high school or college affiliation
- workplace or organization
- affiliation with a certain network or group on the website
Once you find someone you know, you can send that person a message asking them to join your social network. The invitation works both ways. If the other person accepts the invitation, you're automatically added to their social network as well. People can decline your invitation, too.
Facebook Friend Request
Making Online Connections
Now that you've found everyone you know from the offline world, it's time to get into the real fun of online social networking, which is browsing for new and interesting people to contact and add to your network.
A good place to start is by looking through your friends' connections. On most sites, once someone has been added to your network, you have permission to view the profiles of everyone on their network. When you find an interesting person, you have several options:
- Send them an invite to join your network
- Send them a private message through the website to introduce yourself and say "Hi".
- Post a public message in a special place on their profile.
After you've exhausted your friend's connections, you can start looking for people who have similar hobbies and interests. Social-networking sites allow people to easily create or join groups built around a theme. The possibilities are literally endless. There are groups for sport enthusiasts: football enthusiasts in Africa, basketball enthusiasts in Africa, Volleyball enthusiasts in Africa who also like light food, and so on.
Also, social-networking sites allow you to view at least partial profiles of all of the members of a group. When you find someone interesting, make contact. It's that simple.
Many social-networking sites also allow you to search by keyword or tags. Tags are user-created keywords that can be attached to any piece of content, prefix with a hash (#) letter - a photo, a message board post, a video, a Web page that allows people to know more about it. On a micro blogging site like X (formerly known as Twitter), for example, it's possible to search by tags such as "#cat" "#astronomy" and "#computer".
X (Twitter) tag
If you find a tagged video, photo or message board post that you like, you can follow the link to the user's profile, find out more about them (and their friends) and even ask them to join your network.
There is now no single powerful way of establishing social network connection/interaction among human beings than this Internet social services known as Social Network Service/Sites. Some of these sites connects several people to collaborate in businesses, political ideas, research activities which resulted these people to came up with a very tangible, powerful, and beneficial results/products. We came across several stories about couples that social media network sites led to their successful marriage through the initial connection from this powerful social network services.
Click the link to read about THE BRIEF HISTORY OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SERVICE
Don't forget to share the article on your social media handles by clicking the Share button so that others can also benefit!