An Analysis of Social Media Platforms and Their Broad Impact

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the impact of social media platforms, primarily focusing on Facebook and LinkedIn. It begins with an introduction to these platforms, highlighting their origins and popularity. The report then delves into the purpose of each platform, contrasting Facebook's focus on social connection and personal sharing with LinkedIn's professional networking and business applications. It examines the strengths and weaknesses of each platform, including features, privacy concerns, and potential for misuse. The core of the report investigates the impact of social media, including its influence on education, social behavior, mental health, and employment. Both positive and negative effects are discussed, such as the potential for social awareness and job opportunities versus addiction and mental health issues. The report concludes with a balanced perspective, emphasizing the need for responsible and informed usage of social media platforms. The report cites various academic sources to support its arguments.

Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND ITS IMPACT
SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND ITS IMPACT
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author Note:

1SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND ITS IMPACT
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Purpose.......................................................................................................................................2
Strengths and Weaknesses.........................................................................................................3
Impact.........................................................................................................................................4
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................7
References..................................................................................................................................8

2SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND ITS IMPACT
Introduction
Created by Mark Zuckerberg in the year of 2004 along with his partner Edward
Saverin, in their student life, Facebook has now turned out to be the most popular social
media site for the people of the current generation (Hofstra, Corten & Van Tubergen, 2016).
The major attractive feature of Facebook is its user-friendly nature due to which even a
nonprofessional can open account and use it for social purposes. The people primarily use
this website to connect with their old friends, new acquaintances, relatives and even unknown
people. Facebook, although created in 2004, was not available to the users until 2006 and
since its emergence; it has a user count of more than one billion users. It has become more
popular due to the various recreational activities that it provides to its users (Dubois et al.,
2018). Every month Facebook can boast of 2.23 billion of active users who uses their site for
interaction as well as recreational purposes.
Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn is also a social networking medium used for
connecting user on a professional basis to promote business, recruit people, marketing
purposes and many more business reasons. Founded by Reid Hoffman and his partners in the
year 2002, the site has a count of 630 million registered accounts from more than 150
countries worldwide (Baruffaldi, Di Maio & Landoni, 2017). According to the market survey,
94% of the B2B marketers promote their business by using LinkedIn and distribute their
sales. Thus, various organizations use this site to recruit efficient people by checking their
profile in LinkedIn. Moreover, the people can also check out organizations and job profiles
that is suitable for them from this online site.
Purpose
The primary usage of Facebook is to connect with unknown or new people as well as
reconnect with old friends and acquaintances and get in touch with them occasionally. People

3SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND ITS IMPACT
nowadays stay very busy in their daily life activities and are adopting smart solutions for
every issue. Hence, while connecting with people, they prefer to connect on a short-term
basis rather than talking over phone for long hours. Facebook here provides the platform
where people can upload pictures of their activities whether they are baking a cake or going
to a sea beach for a holiday (Koc-Michalska et al., 2018). In this way, they can update each
other about their lives without even calling. Facebook is also used for marketing purposes.
People can create fan pages or business pages for selling items or make people aware about
their businesses. Hence, Facebook is a component or tool used in the digital marketing
strategy to promote business.
LinkedIn, on the other hand is of complete professional use by the users of the site.
The users of LinkedIn can be classified into two groups- the job-finders and the job-
recruiters. Students who have just passed out from universities can create an account in
LinkedIn to find the different types of job profiles available in the various organizations of
the market. They can also upload their resume in the sites for the organizations to find their
skill sets and call them for interview purposes. Not only the students, but also the office-goers
can also use this site to find better opportunities if they are not satisfied with their current
organization. The organizations too uses this professional site for various purposes. They put
up advertisements on this site if they have vacancies to incorporate skilful talents for their job
profiles (Saint-Jacques et al., 2019). When applicants have applied for the vacant posts, they
can check their resume from their respective LinkedIn profiles and select from them. Thus,
recruitment of people can be done in a cost-effective way using LinkedIn.
Strengths and Weaknesses
The strength of Facebook lies in the features provided by the software developers to
the users of the site. Firstly, it provides a ‘timeline’ where people can share photos, videos

4SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND ITS IMPACT
and other stuffs to upload their content and let their near ones know about their lifestyle.
They can also incorporate a ‘Friend-list’ where they can add people for connecting with each
other. Apart from getting updated from the news feed on the timelines, Facebook
incorporates a private message section called ‘Messenger’ where people can chat with each
other personally without other people being aware about their topic of conversation
(Laureano et al., 2018). Facebook allows people to promote their businesses online by using
this site and thus can be used as a digital marketing tool by various infrastructures such as
restaurants, retail stores and so on for marketing their business. However, the biggest threat
of Facebook is the privacy concern. Accounts of people are hacked by hackers leading to
revelation of confidential data that might lead to detrimental effects. Moreover, the content of
Facebook is not filtered and thus proves to be harmful for the young users of the site.
LinkedIn provides with ample features for its users too like Facebook. It allows the
users to upload their resume in the site that proves to be advantageous for both the users as
well as the organizations to verify whether they are suitable for each other or not. The biggest
advantage of LinkedIn is that it also provides platform for entrepreneurs to spread their
business and thus incorporate this site as a marketing tool. However, the site has its
weaknesses too. The slow reaction of the people on this site makes people miss various
scopes and opportunities (Chen et al., 2018). Moreover, privacy is also another concern
because it incorporates various confidential information of the users such as mail id, contact
numbers and so on. Frauds are also hardly managed on the site that leads to misguidance of
the users.
Impact
Usage of Facebook has become such a raging phenomenon in the society nowadays
that it has turned out to be an addiction for most of its users. The students or more

5SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND ITS IMPACT
specifically the teenagers of the current society has become addicted to the features of this
site and using it excessively for their recreational purposes (Hanna, Kee & Robertson, 2017).
A survey conducted reveals that out of 1000 students only 300 students actively concentrate
on their education while the remaining 700 use Facebook at every 15 minutes interval
(Thapa, 2017). Hence, the social site is having a major negative impact on the education of
the students of current generation that will lead them to an unstable career in their Apart from
studies, the students with the aim of being socially active and being updated about each
other’s life, fail to interact socially in the real life. They are getting more involved in the
virtual world and in turn getting lonelier in the real world by losing out friends. Thus,
Facebook is one of the major reasons of the users of being aggressive, incorporating anti-
social behaviours and being dangerously volatile in their teenage years. Moreover, the users
of Facebook who use the site excessively generates a tendency of narcissism within
themselves (Aabeid, Mustaffa & Budiman, 2016). They tend to spend time on their own,
fascinate about themselves and suffers from excessive self-love. This leads to incorporating
an ignorant attitude towards others and they tend to neglect the surrounding people and the
daily activities.
People who spend more time on Facebook also suffers from mental disorder and
depression because they lose out on their life goals while busy surfing the news feed and
attending the life goals of others through this site (Lee, 2018). Hence, they do get
demotivated when they see people around them are balancing both their real and virtual life
and they are lacking the capability to do so. However, there are positive impacts of using the
site too. The Facebook users tend to generate a virtual empathy towards each other if they
come across any inhuman incidents across their news feed and share them to let others know
about the incident. People are using Facebook to be vocal about the various illegal incidents
that happen nowadays and make people aware about them instantly (Erkan, Gokerik &

6SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND ITS IMPACT
Acikgoz, 2019). This technological development has proved to be effective because the
wrongdoers fear about the consequences of their misdeeds being viral over Internet through
this Website. For instance, if a traffic surgeon is asking for bribes to let go of a rash driver,
the others can do a video of the incident and upload it on Facebook. In this way, both the
surgeon and the driver will fear about the people knowing about their misdeeds.
Similarly, LinkedIn also has its positive and negative impacts on the current
generation. The major positive impact is that there is an increase in employment rate in the
countries due to the increase of the users in LinkedIn. The people are being more aware about
the different kinds of job profiles that are available due to the technological as well as the
social development of the society. Accordingly, they can take measures to upgrade their skill
sets and prepare for these profiles without any delay or extra information. Thus, the job
awareness amongst people is no big issue nowadays. Moreover, the companies are benefitted
financially using the site of LinkedIn as their digital marketing platform (Chang, Liu & Shen,
2017). They can create job posters in a software and upload them on the site for the people to
notice it and apply for the vacant posts. Thus, the companies can implement cost-effective
digital marketing strategies by using LinkedIn that proves to be advantageous for them. Both
the employers as well as the recruiters can avail for jobs at any convenient place and need not
rush about the availability of jobs.
However, there are negative impacts too of using LinkedIn. Various fraud companies
publicize about job advertisements and extract money from the users for filling up job forms.
The people who lack experience of the practical field will easily fall into such traps and lose
money for getting jobs. Moreover, the profile users also tend to upload fake resumes (Arora
et al., 2018). The organizations in these cases have to waste their valuable time in recruiting
such people. Hence, although the site proves to be useful for the job seekers, at times are
dangerous for the fraud cases developed on the same site.

7SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND ITS IMPACT
Conclusion
Technology is a useful tool only if it is used wisely and in a balanced way. Over-
excessive usage of any technology has its negative impacts too. The usage of social media
sites nowadays has various advantages and disadvantages. The report thoroughly discusses
about the two reigning social medias- the Facebook and the LinkedIn. Although they are both
social sites, they differ from the perspective of the users. Facebook is completely used for
recreational purposes while LinkedIn provides a platform for professional use. The sites deals
with data of the individual users and thus always incorporates risks about data loss and
hacking. However, it has its positive sides too that incorporates business promotions and
general awareness. In conclusion, it can be said that, if people tends to use both the sites in a
balanced and effective way, the current generation can progress without causing harm to
themselves.

8SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND ITS IMPACT
References
Aabeid, M., Mustaffa, C. S., & Budiman, A. (2016). Impacts of Facebook Usage on Non-
Profits and Donors Relationship Building and Maintenance. New Media and Mass
Communication, 46(2016), 13-20.
Arora, A., Arora, A., McIntyre, J. R., & Ayala, C. (2018). International Business Risk
Comprehension Word Mapping Game Using LinkedIn Social Media Platform in
Interdisciplinary Business Education. Journal of International Business
Education, 13, 221-236.
Baruffaldi, S. H., Di Maio, G., & Landoni, P. (2017). Determinants of PhD holders’ use of
social networking sites: An analysis based on LinkedIn. Research policy, 46(4), 740-
750.
Chang, S. E., Liu, A. Y., & Shen, W. C. (2017). User trust in social networking services: A
comparison of Facebook and LinkedIn. Computers in Human Behavior, 69, 207-217.
Chen, X., Liu, Y., Zhang, L., & Kenthapadi, K. (2018, July). How LinkedIn economic graph
bonds information and product: applications in LinkedIn salary. In Proceedings of the
24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data
Mining (pp. 120-129).
Dubois, A., Zagheni, E., Garimella, K., & Weber, I. (2018, September). Studying migrant
assimilation through Facebook interests. In International Conference on Social
Informatics (pp. 51-60). Springer, Cham.
Erkan, I., Gokerik, M., & Acikgoz, F. (2019). The Impacts of Facebook Ads on Brand Image,
Brand Awareness, and Brand Equity. In Handbook of Research on Entrepreneurship
and Marketing for Global Reach in the Digital Economy (pp. 442-462). IGI Global.

9SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND ITS IMPACT
Hanna, B., Kee, K. F., & Robertson, B. W. (2017). Positive impacts of social media at work:
Job satisfaction, job calling, and Facebook use among co-workers. In SHS web of
conferences (Vol. 33, p. 00012). EDP Sciences.
Hofstra, B., Corten, R., & Van Tubergen, F. (2016). Who was first on Facebook?
Determinants of early adoption among adolescents. new media & society, 18(10),
2340-2358.
Koc-Michalska, K., Lilleker, D., Gibson, R., Michalski, T., & Zajac, J. (2018). Populism and
Facebook: 14 countries, 117 parties and the 2014 European Parliamentary election.
Laureano, R. M., Fernandes, A. L., Hassamo, S., & Alturas, B. (2018). Facebook satisfaction
and its impacts on fundraising: a case study at a Portuguese non-profit
organization. Journal of Information Systems Engineering & Management, 3(1), 04.
Lee, C. (2018). Assessing the uses and impacts of Facebook for teaching and learning in
classroom education contexts in Malaysian universities (Doctoral dissertation,
Lancaster University).
Saint-Jacques, G., Varshney, M., Simpson, J., & Xu, Y. (2019). Using Ego-Clusters to
Measure Network Effects at LinkedIn. arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.08755.
Thapa, N. (2017). PERCEPTIONS OF TEENAGERS AND PARENTS ABOUT IMPACTS
OF FACEBOOK ON THEIR RELATIONSHIP.