James
Catalano October 22, 2013
Mr.
Hennings BCA
“Twitter”
Twitter is an online social
networking system that allows people to communicate with each other by sending
tweets with a limit of 140 characters per tweet. Twitter was created in 2006 and now has about
554,750,000 users with the numbers constantly increasing. It is used for many reasons such as
recreational, social, entertainment, news and marketing for business. With 58 million tweets per day, Twitter is
developing into a massive online network that society is finding itself
dependent on time and time again.
Perhaps the biggest use of Twitter
is for recreational use. Millions of
people log in everyday to post about their daily lives and their feelings. It is a way to tell their followers how they
are doing without necessarily telling them in person. One of the overall goals and recreational
goals of Twitter is to gain as many followers as possible. The more followers someone has, the more
people they can directly and indirectly communicate with. Also, the more people someone follows, the
more information they can find out on others for their own personal
entertainment. Another major
recreational use of Twitter is to follow celebrities, athletes and political
leaders. Twitter is a public network and
many famous people have accounts that other users can follow. This allows for people to catch-up on the
latest news and drama of their favorite celebrities. Although this is a great way for people to
interact and learn about friends and celebrities, Twitter is often abused as
people start to stalk or harass others.
This can result in lawsuits being filed if harassment gets too extreme
and overwhelming.
Along with the recreational use,
another big use of twitter is for social interaction. As previously stated, Twitter is basically a
big online network that's main purpose is to allow people to communicate and
interact with each other. Twitter has
many ways of interacting with others.
One way is through direct messaging others. Direct messaging is basically a way for two
people to chat with each other privately without the conversation showing up on
other's news feeds. However, the most
popular way of directly communicating with others on Twitter is through
"tagging" others in tweets. By
"tagging" other people, you are mentioning them in your own tweet
which can lead to a conversation that can be seen by all of your
followers. However, this can lead to
abuse if people tag others for negative reasons such as making fun of
them. This is a major form of cyber
bullying because most Twitter users are from ages 10-25 years old.
Going hand in hand with recreational
and social use, Twitter is also used for entertainment. With about 9,100 tweets per second, it is
easy to see that Twitter is highly addictive as many people just find it fun to
use. It is fun to tweet and to see how
others react to your tweets, whether it is positive or negative. It is entertaining for people to read shorts
bits of information posted by friends, celebrities and companies/organizations
that they are interested in. Twitter has
about 50 million active users per day.
This number shows that there is potential of abuse on Twitter because so
many people are logging on multiple times per day. People may be too entertained with Twitter
and are becoming more and more depend on it and other social media websites.
Not only is Twitter used by people
to connect with one another, it is also used by businesses to promote and
market their company. Both big and small
businesses use Twitter to positively promote themselves. Large companies such as Nike, Coca-Cola,
Samsung and Starbucks range from about 2 million followers to 5 million
followers. This means that these
companies are spreading information and promotional advertisements to millions
of people, allowing them to learn more about their product. This also allows companies to directly
contact customers in a positive way.
This helps them increase profit and public relations due to their great success
in marketing their company. This can
bring negative effects on companies as well as people could tweet bad news
about the company. This bad news is now
accessible to virtually anyone in the world.
This means it is very important for businesses to stay on top of their
accounts and constantly have positive tweets that boost support for them.
Twitter is also used for news on
various subjects ranging from all topics imaginable. There are millions of accounts that provide
news about sports, politics, celebrities, companies, economics, etc. The list goes on and on. People can find Twitter accounts broadcasting
news on virtually any type of information.
This can potentially bring abuse though as there may even be too many
accounts broadcasting news to the world.
This can lead to contradicting reports, unpopular news, irrelevant news
and false information provided to millions of people. However, Twitter is overall a great place to
get information and news from credible sources and accounts.
Links
http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/11/13/in-depth-study-of-twitter-how-much-we-tweet-and-when/
http://perezhilton.com/2012-08-31-leann-rime-suing-kimberly-smiley-for-recording-phone-call#sthash.BUB0dJz6.dpbs
http://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/
http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-top-20-brands-on-twitter-ranked-by-influence-with-customers-2012-7#2-starbucks-19
http://www.twitter.com
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