Social Media Formats; Which One Takes the Cake

I have already discussed one online communication tool that I feel is new and fresh and useful. But what about all the other platforms that are available at the fingertips of anyone with a phone and internet connection? How do they compare to each other, personally and professionally? Does one seem to be taking a step forward in the public eye while another falls behind? Is one platform slowly becoming obsolete?

I would say these questions garner far more than one simple response because there are so many perspectives to look at the world of social media from. Every generation uses social media differently, every brand uses social media differently, and every person has a personal bias about what platform they feel is better than the rest.

Today, in my world, twitter takes the cake for both entertainment value and keeping me updated on world events. According to statista.com, twitter’s user base has been gradually going up since 2010. Now it has about 330 million active users. I feel that twitter forces people to think more carefully about the words they use because they have a limited amount of characters. Along with that, the average human attention span is 8 seconds, so if someone’s attention can’t be grabbed in 8 seconds they will not consume the content fully.

That is where I feel that facebook lacks for me because I often find myself not being fully engaged. For the younger generation, fast-paced media (such as twitter and tik tok) are taking the cake in popular media. However, there are substantially higher numbers of active users on Facebook as it reached 2.45 billion users this year. Facebook seems like the home base of all media.

These are both important when it comes to information, but for entertainment, Instagram has been a constant for many people of all generations. Instagram also allows for fast scrolling and minimal attention span.

When it comes to maintaining the integrity of journalism, twitter falls flat because it is incredibly easy for false information to go viral in a matter of hours. That being said, facebook struggles with that as well. Journalistic integrity as a whole is on a downswing because in the world of social media, it takes wild headlines and crazy stories to catch people’s attention.