Today I’m going to be comparing and contrasting some different social media platforms, as well as talking about their history and how they were founded, their popularity, and their different uses to the consumer!
First, we have to talk about the largest social media giant of the U.S., Meta, the parent company of both FaceBook and Instagram, the first and third largest social media platforms respectively. Facebook was founded by a young Mark Zuckerberg in college, and its original purpose was actually as a photo sharing and rating app for Harvard University, where Zuck was attending at the time. He eventually re-branded to be an all-round social media platform for the sharing of photos, videos, and written posts across all the users, though the Facebook Algorithm recommends more of what you are interested as you use the app and it collects information about you. This is basically how all social medias work.
The second largest social media platform, and, in my opinion, the best one, is YouTube. YouTube is the hub for all things video. It includes three main types of video: Long Form (>1 min), Short Form (<1 min), and Live Streams. YouTube has also been proven to have the least toxic community on it. YouTube Shorts are a video format based off of TikTok, which I’ll talk about later. YouTube is also the best place to search for tutorials, and also just information in general, which makes sense, since Google owns it. YouTube was founded as way to easily share, of course, cat videos! So YouTube began.
Instagram is FaceBook’s sister company, being recently acquired my Meta. Instagram functions mainly as a platform for sharing photos, and not so much a platform for messages and videos as much, though FaceBook and Instagram both have access to Reels, a sort of short form content more like TikTok, which I’ll talk about next. It is the third largest social media giant.
TikTok is the fourth largest social media, and personally my least favorite. TikTok is also relatively new, being founded in 2016. It has taken the younger generation by storm, and lots of teenagers, specifically, use it today. It is primarily short form vertical content, that has a maximum time limit of two minutes. The reason it took off so much is because people really like the dopamine rush they get whenever they watch a new video. Personally, I don’t see the appeal as much as others, but because of TikTok’s success, lots of other companies have copied it, like YouTube with Shorts and Meta with Reels.
The last social media I’m going to talk about is Snapchat, which I, by far, know the least about. Snapchat is a sort of glorified messaging app, used mainly for messaging and sending photos and very short videos to friends, basically, a worse version of discord (which I am not mentioning here because it’s not really a social media in the sense of the others).
Social Media has changed communication as we know it, for better or for worse. You have access to a constant stream of information and entertainment at will, and that has changed lots of different parts of society as we know them.