Social media trends in 2015 and the near future

Are you curious about the social media trends in 2015 or the near future?

Here I want to share a graph and an article with you.



I am interested in the following trends:

1. "Video is the next big thing in content marketing"

This predicted trend is helpful not only in marketing, but also in education. Appropriately importing videos in education, beyond instructors' playing videos, would be beneficial to both instructors and learners.

2. "Social media marketing improves search engine ranking"

That is, our activities and thoughts about one brand on social media will affect the brand's  appearing in search results. Then what about instructors, educational organizations? I think the effect of social media on instructors and educational organizations's rankings in search engine is also powerful.

3. "It is not going to be easy for new social media platforms"

It is normal for users to be tired to face so many similar social media tools and just adopt the most famous or recommended one without exploring differences among those similar tools. Therefore, to attract people's attention and gain success, people who want to design a new social media tool should pay attention to distinctive and neat functions.

How to protect your privacy when using social media

Everyone knows today that one will leave a footprint when clicking one link, posting, and commenting. Further, this footprint would be hard to completely deleted. This article warns us that rising use of social media also raises our risks of identity theft. And it also provides us with some suggestions to prevent from identity theft:

1. Be careful to enter sensitive info such as SSN, credit cards, and so on

This advise actually is useless, because most of time we cannot choose not to provide these kinds of information when shopping and opening a new account, for example. And it is not uncommon that companies such as Target was hacked and their customers were risk in identity theft.

2. Make strong password and change them often

Everyone knows this but rarely change password regularly.

3. Be careful what you click

People often realize just after clicking some viral links.

4. Do not overshare

The article give an funny example about sharing SSN with others. Who will do it? I think this should be changed to ask sharing websites to take much more responsibilities to protect users' sharing.

5. Check your privacy setting

Often it is hard for users to touch the privacy control in essence. Users should know which privacy is at risk and how in a simple and readable way.

6. Think before posting

What should I think? If think thoroughly and conservatively, no one will post anything.

Anyway, my point of view in this post is to ask government and social media company to take more responsibilities to protect users' privacy and thus make users feel safe and comfortable when enjoining social media, rather than persuading users to keep far away from social media and provide unpractical advises.

Ponder over Snapchat

Snapchat is a video messaging application with the function that senders can set a time limit (one to 10 seconds) on how long recipients can view the snaps. I really have no idea why Snapchat became popular in America relying on this one unusual function.

1. Why do people need to set a time limit now that they decide to post the snaps?

I get answers for this question explained by people sending sexting, cheating in tests, and other negative purposes. In a positive way, what are people's purposes on using this function?

2. Can people really hide snaps after the set time?

People can use screenshots, even if Snapchat claims that they will let senders know if recipients take screenshots of their snaps. Moreover, there are many apps to display unopened snaps, such as SnapSpy. More importantly, those hidden snaps are not completely deleted from Snapchat's servers.

3. Why the similar apps with Snapchat are not popluar at all in China?

After Snapchat being popular in America, many similar apps appear and even QQ develop a similar function. But all of them fail to attract Chinese people's interest. Someone says it is because Chinese people prefer chatting to social networks, but Americans are the opposite. Other people think that it is because Chinese people want to keep positive facing their relatives and friends while Americans like to showcase their different sides from their regular life to surprise their friends.

What do you think about them?

Ponder over Yik Yak

It is not uncommon that one day you wake up and then find one word, idea, or app fill up all your world. It attract public's attention and catch on so fast and so widely. Yik Yak is one of them, although I just knew it today from the discussion board of the course. I search it to figure out why Yik Yak is so popular among college students.

1. Yik Yak allows users to anonymously microblog.

This reminds me of the anonymous board on university BBS in China. In China many university has at least one BBS, and on the BBS the anonymous board is always one of the most popular boards. Students and even faculty would speak out freely and find people's most authentic thoughts on the anonymous board.

2. Users of Yik Yak inside the certain radius can post and read other people's “yaks”, and "peek" other Yik Yak community feeds.

I personally have a habit- searching film reviews after watching a film, because I have some thoughts about the film and want to see if others have the same thoughts with me. This kind of curious is not limited to the film. For example, my housing community recently decides to paint some parts (the other parts keep the old gray color) of walls in orange, and I want to complain about it because the part orange makes the apartments weird and ugly. This thing is so small to google. But using Yik Yak might help me find people nearby comment on the same thing.

Yik Yak's main audiences are limited to college students and is also criticized for cyber-bullying. Anyway, it's easy to open a shop but hard to keep it always open. Let's see what will happen to Yik Yak in the future.

Social media to learn a new language

In addition to Duolingo, there are other social media to learn a new language. For example,

BusuuItalki
Lang-8
Live Mocha
My Happy Planet
Palabea
VoxSwap

All of them provide learners opportunity to find native speakers of the new language to help correct writing, chat, watch instructional videos, or answer questions. Among those social media, I especially like Live Mocha and Palabea.

Live Mocha provides learner incentives, Mocha and teacher points, for learning. For actively engaging in the site or completing course works, learners could earn Mocha points, and for helping other users with correcting, flashcards or translations, they could earn teacher points. With those points, users could enjoy more functions provided by the website.

In Palabea, learners could record their own video lesson and then upload to the site, which is also used in my class before knowing this website.

I think those two ides in Live Mocha and Palabea are also great for classroom learning. I have tried the later one for two semesters and receive great feedback from my students.

What do people think about using social media in education?

I cam across read an article, My Favorite Teachers Use Social Media: A Student Perspective, which believe that students will appreciate instructors' using social media in classroom and thus encourages instructors to do that. The article is quite common. But the following three comments are interesting.

All of the three comments indicate that people have negative opinions about the usage of social media in education. They think that (1) social media let people ignore real-life communication; (2) students dislike instructors using social media in education because of fears about instructors "stalking" them and performing not well; and (3) technology, including social media, fail to actually attract students' attention.

We are students majoring at instructional technology and thus are enthusiastic about social media in education. However, in most of other majors, social media seem to be seldom used by instructors. Moreover, many people hold similar opinions with the aforementioned three comments. These really give us challenges to design effective usage of social media in education and promote it.

Cultural differences on social media

Do you think there are culture differences on social media among different countries?

Yes. For example, Asian people are fans of male stars look like this:

and this:

I think most of American won't be obsessed by them.

Some people think that there are cultural differences in how people want to meet
why Facebook will not rule the world is among different countries. For instance, "In Australia and the US, most of us grew up with a sense of comfort in who we are, but we're lucky that way," says Steven Goh, co-founder of social network Migme. "In Indonesia, the Middle East, parts of Asia, it's not the same and they want to be able to play online without it having real world ramifications. So we let them create a virtual identity, which is very important for our users."

And thus we see the two new social media based on the belief: Migme and GetYou. Different from Facebook, Migme allows people to use names (rather than real names) or avatars they like and GetYou users are encouraged to meet new people rather than people they already know.

In China, most of people like to use screen names rather than real name, but at the same time they like to have official authentication by Sina Weibo. Most of social media in both China and America do allow users have options to choose to use real or screen names.

Also, in my opinion, GetYou will not be popular in China because most of people are on the alert of fraud.