What is Social media?

Social media is a collective term for websites and applications that focus on communication, community-based input, interaction, content-sharing, and collaboration.

People use social media to stay in touch and interact with friends, family, and various communities. Businesses use social applications to market and promote their products and track customer concerns.

What are the benefits of social media?

Social media provides several benefits, including the following:

• User visibility. Social platforms let people easily communicate and exchange ideas or content.
• Business and product marketing. These platforms enable businesses to quickly publicize their products and services to a broad audience. Businesses can also use social media to maintain a following and test new markets. In some cases, the content created on social media is the product.
• Audience building. Social media helps entrepreneurs and artists build an audience for their work. In some cases, social media has eliminated the need for a distributor, because anyone can upload their content and transact business online. For example, an amateur musician can post a song on Facebook, get instant visibility among their network of friends, who in turn share it on their networks.

What are the challenges of social media?

Social media can also pose challenges to individual users, in the following ways:

• Mental health issues. Overuse of social apps can result in burnout, social media addiction, and other issues.
• Polarization. Individuals can end up in filter bubbles. They create the illusion of open discourse when the user is actually sequestered in an algorithmically generated online community.
• Disinformation. Polarized environments foster the spread of disinformation where the perpetrator's intent is to deceive others with false information.

Businesses face similar and unique social media challenges.

• Offensive posts. Conversations on intranets and enterprise collaboration tools can veer off into non-work-related subjects. When that happens, there is potential for co-workers to disagree or be offended. Controlling such conversations and filtering for offensive content can be difficult.
• Security and retention. Traditional data security and retention policies may not work with the features available in collaboration tools. This can raise security risks and compliance issues that companies must deal with.
• Productivity concerns. Social interaction, whether online or in-person, is distracting and can affect employees' productivity.

• Most popular social networking services

  The following is a list of the most popular social networking services based on the number of active users as of January per Statista.

  
  

  Social networking services with the most users, January 2021

  #	Network Name	Number of Users (in millions)	Country of Origin
  1	Facebook	2,740	United States
  2	YouTube	2,291	United States
  3	WhatsApp	2,000	United States
  4	Facebook Messenger	1,300	United States
  5	Instagram	1,221	United States
  6	WeChat	1,213	China
  7	QQ	800	China
  8	TikTok	689	China
  9	Douyin	600	China
  10	Sina Weibo	511	China

  
  
  
  
• Facebook 

  Facebook changes its corporate name to Meta,

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• Instagram: (Click)
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• QQ: (Click)
• TikTok: (Click)
• Douyin: (Click)
• Sina Weibo: (Click)

• Apps used by U.S. tweens (ages 9–12), 2019-2020^{[75]: 39–42}

  Platform	Overall	Boys	Girls	9-year-olds	12-year-olds
  YouTube	67%	68%	66%	53.6%	74.6%
  Minecraft	48%	61%	35%	43.6%	49.9%
  Roblox	47%	44%	49%	41.2%	41.7%
  Google Classroom	45%	48%	41%	39.6%	49.3%
  Fortnite	31%	43%	20%	22.2%	38.9%
  TikTok	30%	23%	30%	16.8%	37%
  YouTube Kids	26%	24%	28%	32.7%	22.1%
  Snapchat	16%	11%	21%	5.6%	22.3%
  Facebook Messenger Kids	15%	12%	18%	19.1%	10.4%
  Instagram	15%	12%	19%	3%	28.8%
  Discord	8%	11%	5%	0.7%	14.4%
  Facebook	8%	6%	9%	2.2%	15%
  Twitch	5%	7%	2%	1.0%	9.9%
  None of the above	5%	6%	5%	9.6%	3.3%

  Social media platforms used by U.S. kids in 2020 (ages 13–18) and 2017 (ages 10–18)

  Platform	2020	2017
  YouTube	86%	70%
  Instagram	69%	60%
  Snapchat	68%	59%
  TikTok	47%	N/A
  Facebook	43%	63%
  Twitter	28%	36%
  Reddit	14%	6%
  Another social networking service	2%	3%
  Do not use social networking service	4%	6%

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