In this blog post, we take a closer look at the convenience and addictiveness of social media, as well as the psychology behind our unconscious usage.
Have you ever used one of the half-price discount coupons that have become popular recently? These coupons allow you to purchase items at prices much lower than the market price, and are conditional on a large number of purchases being made, with a significant discount applied as announced. Websites that sell these coupons are characterised by their ability to quickly promote their products through social media such as Facebook and Twitter. These social media platforms are not just for selling products, but also for spreading social, political, and everyday news, creating a huge ripple effect. As one of the most frequently used keywords in news and articles these days, most people, not just young people, have heard of social media at least once. So, let’s take a look at what exactly social media is.
“Social Network Service (SNS) refers to an online platform that creates and strengthens social relationships through free communication and information sharing between users, as well as the expansion of personal networks. Today, most SNS are web-based services, but in addition to the web, they also provide means for users to communicate with each other via email and instant messaging. SNS is often misused as the same concept as social media, but it is more appropriate to categorise it as a type of social media, along with blogs, wikis, UCC, and microblogs.”
The above is the definition of social network service according to Wikipedia. At first glance, it seems no different from online services such as blogs and personal homepages that we have been using, but what are the characteristics that distinguish SNS from previous services and allow it to be classified as a separate category from other online services?
First, SNS makes it easy to access various types of content. In traditional blogs, each person has their own space to post content, so in order to view a person’s post, you need to go to that person’s blog and click on the post, which is a tedious process. On the other hand, SNS such as Facebook has a shared space called a ‘news feed,’ where all the posts of people you have set to receive are organised in one place, allowing you to view all content in a continuous stream. It may seem like a small thing to find a post with a few clicks, but think about it. There is a big difference between visiting the blogs of 10 online friends and viewing their posts one by one on boards organised according to their preferences, and viewing everything on a single screen with a simple scroll of your finger. Furthermore, in today’s multimedia era, content exists in various forms, such as text, photos, videos, and sounds. SNS gathers this diverse content in a news feed and displays it in an integrated manner without distinction, adding continuity to the reader’s experience.
In addition, social media news feeds provide a personalised experience. By identifying the types of content that users like or view frequently and prioritising related posts, users spend more time and attention on the platform. This increases user satisfaction while providing better targeting opportunities for advertisers, ultimately increasing the profitability of social media platforms.
Second, social media makes it easy to share content. When using social media, it is not difficult to find posts about helping the poor in Somalia, encouraging support for babies with life-threatening birth defects, or funny posts full of humour and wit. Such posts are shared by hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of people. This is an amazing phenomenon that is difficult to find in existing online services. Users share the same post as is, or with their own comments, and the post that started somewhere is shared in a chain reaction, eventually causing a huge ripple effect regardless of nationality. Looking at the date of creation, there are quite a few cases where it was posted less than a few days ago. The reason for this frightening ripple effect is the easy sharing function of social media. On social media, you can share a post made by someone else simply by clicking the ‘Share’ button, and that post will also be shared on your friends’ news feeds. This is only a slight difference from the tedious process of copying and pasting text and downloading and re-uploading photos, but as you can see from the previous paragraph, subtle differences in convenience can actually lead to huge differences in results.
This convenient sharing feature is the source of the tremendous influence of social media, making it an excellent platform for social commerce, which generates profits by placing advertisements on social media, and various games. It is also important to note that the sharing feature of social media is not limited to personal use.
Companies, non-profit organisations, and even government agencies utilise the ripple effect of social media to promote their activities and campaigns. The sharing function of social media is widely used for various purposes, such as viral marketing of specific products, raising awareness of social issues, and rapid information dissemination in emergency situations. This goes beyond simple ease of use and acts as an important factor in revolutionising the information distribution structure of modern society.
Third, social media is non-anonymous. We often post not only information such as our favourite books, movies, and celebrities on Facebook, Twitter, and Me2Day, but also personal information such as our names, phone numbers, hometowns, and schools we attended or are currently attending. Of course, other Internet sites also require basic user information, but this is only for the purpose of identity verification to prevent identity theft and duplicate registrations, and the disclosure of personal information after registration is strictly limited. However, in the case of social media, there is no strict identity verification process, so even if you provide false personal information, you can still sign up, and people voluntarily reveal their personal information. This is the voluntary non-anonymity of social media. The reason for this contradictory situation, where people voluntarily reveal information about themselves in places where it is not necessary, is simple. In most cases, social media accounts are online images that act as an extension of offline relationships based on the real-world self. Activities that are an extension of offline networking mean that sharing information such as your name and hometown on social media accounts is similar to sharing such information with people nearby in the offline world. In other words, the same psychology that drives people to create and strengthen relationships based on commonalities such as their hometown or high school also applies online.
This voluntary anonymity contributes to increasing user trust. Communication based on real names and actual information gives the other party a sense of trust, which has led to the widespread use of social media for formal purposes such as business. In fact, many companies use social media to communicate with their customers, and customers also obtain reliable information through companies’ official social media accounts.
