What Are Social Networks? A Practical Beginner Guide

Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. We are born social. That is why we assemble ourselves in cities, and agglomeration to live, we keep in touch with family and friends without forgetting our colleages. With the emergence of the internet, we come to find new ways to connect together, through a lot of web sites that allow us to create a profile, share photos, videos, and communicate with our connections: this is social networks. We are going to talk about the most popular ones, and to give some tips on how to best use them.

The most popular social media platforms and apps of 2022

• Most used social networks:
  1. Facebook, from Meta (over 2.5 billion monthly users)
  2. Youtube, from Google, is the most used social networks by internet users (over 2 billion monthly users)
  3. Instagram, from Meta (600 million users, or over 1 billion monthly users)
  4. WhatApp, from Meta (over two billion active monthly users)
  5. Twitter is a microblogging platform where you can post content of 280 characters long (formerly 140 characters) (300 million monthly active users)
  6. LinkedIn, for the professional world (467 million users)
  7. Snapchat, from Snap, is an instant messaging app for sharing temporary or disappearing images and short video messages (over 306 million daily active users)
  8. Pinterest social bookmarking site for saving ideas and finding creative inspiration on cooking, DIY home projects, vacation ideas, interior design, business (320. to 444 million monthly users)
• Messaging Social Networks apps
  1. WhatsApp
  2. Messenger, from Facebook’s Meta (over 1.3 billion active users)
  3. Telegram (400 million monthly active users)
  4. WeChat, mainly used in China (over 1.25 billion monthly active users)
• Social Networks to find jobs
  1. Indeed.com
  2. LinkedIn
  3. Fiverr.com
  4. Instagram
  5. Flickr
  6. Pinterest
  7. Upwork.com
  8. Freelancer.com
• Social Networks to share and watch videos
  1. Youtube
  2. Vimeo
  3. Tiktok, from ByteDance (800 million monthly to 1 billion monthly active users)
• Musicians’ social platform
  1. MySpace.com, was the #1 social network before Facebook and twitter
  2. Spotify
  3. SoundCloud
  4. ReverbNation
• Local businesses and restaurants’ social networks
  1. Yelp
  2. Foursquare
  3. TripAdvisor
• Microbloging social sites
  1. Twitter
  2. Reddit (over 1.3 billion monthly visitors)
  3. Tumblr
• Questions and Answers social sites
  1. Quora.com (over 300 million monthly users)
  2. WikiHow.com
  3. Howstuffworks.com
  4. Zhihu
• Other International Social Networks
  1. QQ, mainly in China ( 639 million monthly active users strong,)
  2. VK.com, Russian type of Facebook (over 140 million users)
  3. Sonico, A Latin-American type of Facebook, also popular in Portugal and Spain
  4. Zhihu, Chinese social app for questions and answers
  5. NK.pl a Polish social site where middle, high school and college students

Why we need social networks

People engaged in social networking may be doing so as a personal or a business endeavor. Those who engage on social network sites as a personal endeavor interact by using various forms of media to discuss their lives and interests.

The popularity of Social Networking sites has rapidly increased over the past few years. Social networks provide many kinds of services and benefits to their users like helping them to connect with new people, share opinions with like-minded people, and stay in touch with old friends and colleagues.

Social Networking gives people an opportunity to meet new people around the world. Users of these sites have access to millions of profiles from around the world. Before the advent of social networking sites, chat rooms were the only way to meet new people on the internet. But, the main drawback of chat rooms was that you may not know the person with whom you are interacting with. The introduction of profiles on social networking sites allowed people to know more information about a person before they interact with them.

Most of the highly popular social networking sites like Facebook and Youtube are free which made them open to everybody. These sites mostly make their money through advertisements. Popular Social Networking sites are built in such a way that they are very much user-friendly. Most sites are so easy to navigate that they require very less knowledge of the internet.

Social Media ✅ Dos and 🛑 Don’ts

• 👎 Don’t put all your personal information public and don’t share your wareabouts
• 👎 Don’t bombard your friends with unverified and messages urelated to them or adcertisements
• 👎 Don’t watch/share illegal/immoral or improper material or comments
• 👎 Dpn’t use social media excessivelly. Don’t answer all the notifications right away. Turn them off at meal time
• 👎 Do not post about your school, your work or your boss

• 👍 Do value personal interactions over social media friends
• 👍 Do Adjust your privacy settings
• 👍 Limit Details About Work History
• 👍 Use Single Sign-On: Open ID or Login with Gmail
• 👍 Know How to Block Unfriendly Followers

What Goes Online Stays Online

With more than 100 social media sites, plaforms and apps, it’s unlikely to be able to manage more than 10 accoints actively, Try to limit your usage to 5 social networks or less. Remember what goes online, stays online, even if you delete it. For example, you share an improper picture in facebook. Your friends repost this content to other plaforms. And, thoses sites were crawaled by some search engines. And later on, you decide to delete that improper contnent, because you are looking for a job. You apply for teh job, and your potental employer check your social networks, and find out that improper content. And you loose that job opportunity.

Use social networks sparingly. And vaue personal relationship oever online friends, followers, and fans.

Be Social Media Smart. and Always stay safe.