Introduction
The rapidly develop of the electronic age, lead to that the social network has become an indispensable part of people’s daily. This essay will divide into three parts, the advantages and disadvantages of social media and the social media in China. Firstly, according to Tax institute social media team “Social media is an umbrella term that encompasses any media, generally online, that facilitates social networking the interaction and sharing of content and user experiences.” Social media is allowing people to write, share, evaluation, discussion, mutual communication and technology website. Social media should be a large number of netizens spontaneously contribution, extraction, the creation of news and information, process and communication. Produce of social media is dependent on the development of web.
Most people may unfamiliar with the concept of social media, but they may use it everyday. For instance, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram are the most general social media platforms. This may be unbelievable, “social media have been growing at a tremendous rate and adoption rate of such media has been skyrocketing which, in turn, has delivered astronomical numbers of users in less than 10 years.”(eds S.Noor AI-Deen and Hendricks)
It has been claimed that “The most well know social media platform is Facebook, an online social network service provided by USA. In 2004 Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes constructed Facebook, all of them are students of Harvard University. Facebook has become the world’s biggest social network and has more than one billion users in 2012 and about half is to use Facebook everyday”. (Mark Hall,2014)Let’s see how social media marketing works with Facebook.
Body
There is no doubt; social network brings a lot of benefits to people, not only for individual, but also for many enterprises. In this section, I would like to discuss the benefits for individual, company and questioned about it.
Generally, information can be rapidly spread by internet users. Internet users play an important role in social network. In that way, we can assumptive that the number of users can result a fact which， the association between population and information spread. Andrew(2008) illustrated that “The 18-24 and 25-34 age groups are the most common “heaivy" Internet users, with 62 per cent of each bracket going online more than eight times a week (65 and over was the lowest)”and “The value of e-commerce has jumped from $24.3 billion in 2003, to $56.7 billion in 2006.”However, we know that the population and frequency are still increasing.
For many companies, social media sites also play a significant role. According to Burrus “Today’s web tools, such as blogs, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the many other social media options are all about customer engagement.” Indeed, social media sites give a good opportunity for creative industries. For example, in the condition in 21 century, the digital age promote individuals business allover the world. It suggested that “demonstrates an overview of the level of involvement that each interviewee claimed to have while working with specific online platforms to promote their business.”(Holmes, McLean and Green2012) For my personal experience, the rapidly development of network promoting a lot of individual business, in other words, procurement service becomes the best and fast way to own money. Because it do not have any limitation, just have one phone with social media platforms.
In that term, it may raise some problems. When people facing so much information, they may overwhelmed and confused. In addition, it may also contain a lot of false and outdated information. Is it easy for people filtering that information？At the same time, for enterprises, is it also exist the disadvantages? Or some failure cases, such a marketing method is it suitable for every company?
According to so many questions, in this section, I will discuss some disadvantages of social media sites. First, for individual, especially young people, they may addicted to social media that lead to learning and working efficiency decreases, narcissism, obsessive compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, social phobia, depression and other “self messy" (we may call it iDisorder) phenomenon.
On the other hand, hacker attack, suffer violations of personal privacy and phishing fraud is a potential crisis in network sites. Obviously, the privacy issue is the biggest problem of Facebook, we found the Facebook website operation mode has serious privacy leaks. In social networks, invasion of privacy cases often occur.
For a recent example is from Facebook. Islamic terrorists through Facebook to Australian Government, to declare their terrorist attacks. Such a political participation of the social use, to some extent the information is spreading quickly, but for the public, will it cause the unnecessary panic？
In this section, as an international student, I will demonstrate what the social media in China and compare with other countries.
Firstly, the first step for understanding social media in china star from the population.
It has been argued that “China has over 300 million users of social media, with over 80% of them having multiple accounts. Some Chinese companies employ people to praise their own businesses and disparage competitors.”(Chiu, Ip, and Silverman)
At present, the mainstream social network sites are weibo and wechat. In face, social network sites have changed dramatically in recent years, from the prime social network sites blogs to social community and then the weibo, wechat. Moreover, it can not be ignored that china as the world’s largest population of internet users 513,000,000 people, more than 245,000,000 times the users in USA. The reason why china social media always activity is depend on two mainly reasons. 1.The big market, social media is a larger phenomenon in the world. 2.To follow the same decision-making journey as western countries, also combing own national situation is modified to meet the requirements of Chinese Internet users.
“Chinese consumers follow the same decision-making journey as their peers in other countries, and the basic rules for engaging with them effectively are reassuringly familiar.”
Secondly, As I mentioned before, China social media in some level is “copying” the western social network sites model. Chinese consumers follow the same decision-making journey as their peers in other countries, and the basic rules for engaging with them effectively are reassuringly familiar. For example, RenRen to Facebook, Weibo to twitter. ACCORDING TO China’s social-media users not only are more active than those of any other country but also, in more than 80 percent of all cases, have multiple social-media accounts, primarily with local players (compared with just 39 percent in Japan). Meanwhile, there are 66% of Chinese consumers relied on recommendations from friends and family, compared with 38% of their us counterparts. Obviously, China is not huge in population but also in marketing.
Due to the above reasons, Chinese government is strictly control the network, In another word, censorship become a argument in China. China firewall is longer than Great wall. According to the age, The Chinese Government argues that in order to protect national security and stability, how every it angry the Chinese netizens. Chinese government forbid people to use Youtube, Facebook, Google and Twitter， recently even Instagram, This caused widespread public discontent.
With the Great Wall ancient China, by twenty-first Century the Republic makes fire the Great Wall China’s Great Firewall— official name is Golden Shield Project the international horror Golden Shield project.
The ancient the Great Wall to keep the northern nomads, the Great Wall is now information network monitoring toolsis blocked, let netizens do not see should not look at things. So these should not look at things covers the world’s most common most popular websites.
On the other hand, besides the view from Angry netizens, this kind of forbidden，To promote the domestic media development, manysimilar sites emerge in an endless stream, of course, if notin imitation of the premise is better. Here is a quick link to understand what is the China’s Great Firewall from my other post.
China’s Great firewall is a controversial issue, in order to make the network security and cultural exchanges harmony and balance, which the duties for Chinese netizens. And this may come up questions, is the network security really needs to be protected by a firewall? Because many criminals can still through the wall to achieve the purpose. In addition, cultural exchanges, whether to need freely use? Is it enough for China netizens use the domestic social network sites?
Conclusion
With respect to the significance of the network, we should consider the social network for people’s value, participation in social network, really worthwhile? In the information explosion era, how to correctly use the network sites is the key element not only for companies but also individuality.
REFERENCES
Tax institute social media team http://search.informit.com.au.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/fullText;dn=664938768335001;res=IELAPA
video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzIkKOlaAxU
Social Media: Usage and Impact http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/lib/rmitau/docDetail.action?docID=10511506
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1366111/Facebook
ACMA
GOV
Kate Holmes
http://www.emeraldinsight.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/doi/full/10.1108/13287261211232162
Chiu, Cindy
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/understanding_social_media_in_china