Module 7: Lecture Content – Modern Ways of Communication: Internet
Internet
1.
1. Definition: The internet, is a worldwide network of computers that are interlinked in a similar way to the postal system, but at ultra-fast speeds. With the postal service, we send each other messages written on paper inside sealed envelopes, but with the internet, or the net, we send each other small packets of digital data from our computers (Market Business News, n.d.).
2. Internet-based Communication: It refers to sharing information over the internet, from instant messaging to placing calls. The internet offers multiple ways to communicate that help you save a considerable amount of money. For example, email, social networking, and instant messaging are available for free, while some like internet telephony provide you with numerous advantages at cost-effective prices (Chaturvedi, 2020).
3. Different Ways of Communication on the Internet: The internet has a vast option of information sharing (Chaturvedi, 2020). This includes:
· Instant Messaging: This is one of the most popular ways of communicating on the internet. With it, you can have a private conversation with another individual as well as create a chat room where you can communicate in real-time with more than two people.
The popularity of instant messaging is because of its real-time nature. While email communication makes you wait until the recipient checks it and sends a reply, IM enables you to view if a person in your contact list is online and send a message that appears immediately on his device’s screen.
Many businesses are embracing this type of communication since it allows employees to reach their managers, colleagues, and clients instantly. This helps save time.
· VoIP and Internet Phone System: Internet telephony uses the net as a transmission medium for telephone calls. Individuals and businesses that need to make calls anywhere in the world can benefit immensely from an internet phone system (Chaturvedi, 2020).
On the other hand, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is growing in popularity among businesses expanding globally. It sends voice packets using IP as opposed to PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network).
· Email: Almost all mainframes, microcomputers, and computer networks come with an email system that is confined to a single network, while some boast gateways to other computer systems. With this, you can send an email anywhere in the world (Chaturvedi, 2020).
· Internet Relay Chat: Known as IRC, this is a multi-user chat system that facilitates you to join channels or groups. It works on a client-server model, which means that is necessary to have an IRC client and an active internet connection to join the IRC discussion. Once you join a chat room, you can send messages to the participants (Chaturvedi, 2020).
· Videoconferencing: This is a platform or medium in which two or more participants connect using their own computer networks. It’s necessary that the participants have a microphone, video camera, and speakers connected to their system (Chaturvedi, 2020).
· Wireless Communications and SMS: Short Message Service (SMS) helps you send alphanumeric information wirelessly, but it restricts you from sending images or graphics. Nonetheless, as the wireless service evolved, the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) came, enabling users to send text, numbers, images, graphics, and audio to MMS-capable handsets (Chaturvedi, 2020).
Social Media:
1. Definition and characteristics:
Social media is any digital tool that allows users to create and share content with the public. Social media includes a wide range of websites and apps. For example, Twitter specializes in sharing links and short written messages, while Instagram and TikTok, are built to optimize the sharing of photos and videos. (Hudson, 2020)
Any person with internet access can sign up for a social media account. They can use that account to share whatever content they choose to, and the content they share reaches anyone who visits their page or profile. (Hudson, 2020)
The uniqueness of social media is that it is both broad and relatively uncensored. While many social media companies impose some limitations—such as taking down images that display violence or nudity—there are much fewer limitations on what someone can share than in other mass communication mediums, such as newspapers, radio stations, and television channels. (Hudson, 2020)
2. Social Media Categories: Below are included some social media categories (Hudson, 2020):
· Social Networks: They specialize in connecting and exchanging ideas and content with other users. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are examples of this type of category.
· Media Networks: They specialize in distributing content like photographs and videos. Examples of this type of category are Instagram and YouTube. A YouTube user, for example, will upload a video they’ve created, and other users can “like,” “dislike,” or comment on the video. If they enjoy the video enough, a user may choose to “subscribe” to the creator, so that new videos from that creator appear in their feed.
· Discussion Networks: This type of network is the ideal spot for publications that can spark in-depth discussion among users. Users can leave detailed responses in the comment section, and other users can respond directly to those comments, allowing for conversations to grow and organically develop. An example of this type of network is Reddit.
· Review Networks: Review networks like Yelp and TripAdvisor add social media aspects to user reviews of products and services. There, users can interact directly with those leaving reviews.
3. Biggest Social Media Sites and Apps: Since businesses are growing exponentially in social media platforms, it is necessary to know how deeply each of these platforms reaches into the online community. This is a must in a company’s social media marketing strategy. Choosing which social network your brand is going to focus its marketing efforts on is a very important decision, and it should be based on the company’s objectives, “relative popularity” and “growth”. (Karl, 2022)
Below, are the top 15 social networks that you should consider (Karl, 2022:
· Facebook: Facebook is the undisputed heavyweight champion of social media platforms because it changed how humans interact with each other. Even though Facebook has had several controversies, it hasn’t stopped growing:
(Source: Karl, 2022)
As of January 2022, Facebook has 2.74 billion active users – a number that grows with roughly 500,000 new users every day, or six new users every second. It’s the most popular amongst users aged between 12 and 34 years. Nonetheless, their US-based share of this demographic is shrinking. According to The Infinite Dial reports, people that identify Facebook as their favorite.
Other facts about Facebook (Karl, 2022) are:
· India has 290 million Facebook users, making it the country with the most active users. The United States is the second country with 190 million, while Indonesia is the third one, with 140 million.
· Although Facebook has been criticized of spreading disinformation, 36% of American citizens say they constantly use the platform as a source of information and news.
· The average American spends approximately 38 minutes per day on Facebook.
· YouTube: The second most popular social media platform is YouTube, with 2.29 billion registered users. However, since everyone can play a video on YouTube, whether you’re registered or not, this number might not be representative of the real persons that use it (Karl, 2022).
This social media platform reaches very young age groups. A 2020 study conducted by Pew Research revealed the viewing habits of U.S. children under the age of 11. You can view the data in the image below (Karl, 2022):
(Source: Karl, 2022)
YouTube also boasts some remarkable stats for reaching the adult demographic. Almost 74% of all adults in the United States use YouTube. Moreover, when it comes to national demographics, more than 30% of all YouTube’s traffic originates from only three countries: 16.4% from United States; 9.2% from India; and 4.8% from Japan (Karl, 2022).
WhatsApp: Its original goal wasn’t to be an instant messaging app, but rather to simply show “statuses” next to the names of each entry in a user’s address book. However, it is one of only three social networking platforms with a user base of over 2 billion – a milestone they reached in 2020. The app’s recent growth rate has been astonishing, with the last billion users hopping on in only four years (Karl, 2022).
(Source: Karl, 2022)
Although this app doesn’t integrate advertising into their model, it’s still valuable for business as a communication tool. Moreover, WhatsApp is still the most popular mobile messaging app on earth, beating Facebook Messenger, WeChat, QQ, Telegram, and Snapchat (Karl, 2022).
· Facebook Messenger: Messenger’s initial incarnation was “Facebook Chat”– an IM feature that was launched into the Facebook environment in 2008. Noting Chat’s potential as a standalone app with its own unique commercial ecosystem, Facebook overhauled the service and rebranded it as “Facebook Messenger ” two years later (Karl, 2022).
This app is great for businesses, since they can contact their customers through it. Also, it introduces monetization features in the app’s functionality.
Although Messenger still lags behind WhatsApp in terms of total number of global active users, it’s comfortably the more popular choice amongst users in the United States (Karl, 2022).
(Source: Karl, 2022)
Age-wise, there’s one group that towers above the rest when it comes to Facebook Messenger adoption in the United States (Karl, 2022). You can view that data in the image below.
(Source: Karl, 2022)
· Instagram: The world’s most popular photo-sharing app has a total of 1.22 billion global active users. One of its best contributions was the creation of “influencers”. Certain users’ popularity gave their profiles an aspirational slant, which soon resulted in the birth of a whole new marketing channel that empowered regular folk to monetize their fame (Karl, 2022).
Demographically, Instagram appeals primarily to users under the age of 35, with 71% of the app’s user base falling into this category. It’s also an immensely popular platform for B2C marketing, with more than 70% of U.S. businesses actively using it as a marketing channel. Also, it offers more engagement than Facebook with a 23% higher engagement rate in published images (Karl, 2022).
(Source: Karl, 2022)
· Weixin/WeChat: With 1.213 billion active users, this app allows sending text messages, conducting video calls, processing digital payments, and even play video games (Karl, 2022).
(Source: Karl, 2022)
In 2018 an astonishing 98.5% of Chinese mobile users between the ages of 50 and 80 are registered WeChat users. While 60% of WeChat users over the age of 60 use more than half of their mobile data on the app (Karl, 2022).
For social media marketers in the U.S. considering WeChat as a possible marketing channel, it’s useful to know that 23% of America’s mobile internet users between the ages of 18 and 24 are registered on the app (Karl, 2022).
· TikTok: This is a video-sharing platform that came out in 2017 and skyrocketed within the population. Two years after coming out, TikTok was in the top five of the world’s most downloaded apps. A year later, it was number one (Karl, 2022).
(Source: Karl, 2022)
TikTok still has to catch up with its competitors in terms of the breadth of its demographic reach. In the United States, 47% of the platform’s user base is between the ages of 10 and 29 (Karl, 2022).
· QQ: Launched under the name OICQ in 1999 as a downloadable instant messaging service, the platform quickly became China’s most popular digital contact platform. QQ’s early rise to dominance as a business communication platform was helped by the software’s exceptional handling of file transfers, creating a network effect where needed to be in the platform because all their partners, vendors, and clients were already there (Karl, 2022).
(Source: Karl, 2022)
· Douyin: Douyin is TikTok for a Chinese audience. The two platforms have the same parent company and the same core functionality. However, both are oriented to different demographics. (Karl, 2022).
Unlike TikTok, Douyin has embraced user-monetization and provided content creators with more concrete mechanisms to generate revenue stream from their videos – mainly by integrating with popular Chinese e-commerce platforms.
(Source: Karl, 2022)
· Sina Weibo: Also from China, Sina Weibo started as a micro-blogging site and has evolved into the country’s third-largest social network. Its focus is very much on the creation, delivery, and consumption of user-generated content. It’s an information center that’s been adopted by businesses, journalists, influencers, and regulars (Karl, 2022).
Companies, especially, have taken to Weibo as a marketing platform, with several international brands even succeeding in tapping into the massive Chinese market. The most successful of these has been Tourism Australia, who won Weibo’s “most promising and popular outbound destination award ” at a Chinese influencer summit in 2019 (Karl, 2022).
Nonetheless, the information that’s distributed on Weibo is subject to strict government scrutiny and censorship, but this hasn’t stopped continued efforts by foreign companies wanting to market themselves in it.
(Source: Karl, 2022)
· Telegram: Users left the Facebook-owned chat app in droves – most of them trading it for Telegram, a hyper-secure IM and social networking app favored by blockchain enthusiasts and cryptocurrency traders (Karl, 2022).
The Guardian reports that between January 1 and January 12 of 2021, WhatsApp had fallen from the 8th most downloaded app in the UK to the lowly position of 23rd. During the same period of time, Telegram gained approximately 25 million new users. That’s a 5% increase in their user base in just three weeks (Karl, 2022).
(Source: Karl, 2022)
According to data published by Hootsuite, Telegram users spend more time on the app than those that use Facebook Messenger. Therefore, social media specialists report that the average user spends 2.9 hours per month on Telegram, vs Messenger’s 2.7 hours (Karl, 2022).
· Snapchat: The photo and video-sharing platform became famous for only displaying users’ posts for a limited time before they were deleted. This resonated with a younger generation of mobile internet users (Karl, 2022).
It also helped that the app featured filters and lenses, features that instilled Snapchat interactions with a creative irreverence missing from other social networks.
(Source: Karl, 2022)
Moreover, this app has shown some seriously impressive growth in its daily active users outside of the United States and Europe. From a demographic perspective, two statistics stand out (Karl, 2022):
· 59% of all United States’ internet users between the ages of 13 to 24 are on Snapchat.
· Since 2016, Snapchat has been the most popular social network amongst teens and young adults.
· Kuaishou: Kuaishou is China’s second-biggest video-sharing social network, currently sitting with around 80% of Douyin’s total active users. Functionally, it offers very similar features to Douyin, but there are important differences in the type of content the two networks create and how it is curated and displayed:
· Kuaishou is the more popular platform for live streaming, serving double the amount of live streams in its local content section than Douyin.
· Has a stronger relationship-driven approach to content recommendation. Around half of the content in a user’s feed comes from accounts the user already follows.
· Up to 90%of content displayed on a Douyin user’s feed is from accounts that have gained popularity amongst other users.
(Source: Karl, 2022)
· Pinterest: The image-sharing platform saw a record growth year in 2020, gaining more than 100 million new monthly active users between January and December. (Karl, 2022)
Important information for brands looking to promote themselves on Pinterest is that the platform is only now starting to make its mark outside of the United States. As of January 2021, 23% of the social media platform’s users all find themselves in the United States. The next closest territory is Germany w,hich with 3.9%, and France is third with 2.7% (Karl, 2022).
(Source: Karl, 2022)
Demographically, Pinterest has largely been dominated by female users. Currently, the gender split is sitting at approximately 60/40 percent. This gap is narrowing, however, with the platform reporting a 50% increase in male users in 2020 (Karl, 2022).
· Reddit: Reddit is based on niche. No matter what your interests are and where your passions lie, you’re virtually guaranteed to find a like-minded community ready to embrace and educate you (Karl, 2022).
Founded in 2005, Reddit is one of the oldest social networks featured on our list, a fact that’s evidenced by its similarity to old-school discussion forums. This clearly hasn’t damaged the platform’s ability to continually attract new users, though, as Reddit has consistently maintained a year-on-year growth of 30% (Karl, 2022).
(Source: Karl, 2022)
Reddit thrives in the United States, where 25% of the country’s adults use the platform to read and share information. Its website is currently ranked as the country’s 8th most popular website and boasts an average visit duration of 20.06 minutes, longer than Amazon, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Twitter, and eBay (Karl, 2022).
References:
Chaturvedi, D. (2020). Internet Communications: What is it & ways to communicate over the internet. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/internet-communications-what-ways-communicate-over-diwakar-chaturvediLinks to an external site.
Hudson, M. (2020). What is social media? The Balance Small Business. https://www.thebalancesmb.com/what-is-social-media-2890301Links to an external site.
Karl (2022). The 15 biggest social media sites and apps [2022]. DreamGrow. https://www.dreamgrow.com/top-15-most-popular-social-networking-sites/Links to an external site.
Market Business News (n.d.). What is the internet? Definition and meaning. Market Business News . https://marketbusinessnews.com/financial-glossary/internet-definition-meaning/Links to an external site.
Ohiagu, P.O. (2011). The internet: The medium of mass media. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284733552_The_Internet_The_Medium of_the_Mass_MediaLinks to an external site.
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