Have you ever thought life without social networking? It would have been totally different world than today. Like air to breathe and food to eat, social networking is also an important aspect of life especially for youth.
Let's see what social networking is?
Social networking is the practice of expanding the number of one's business or social contacts by making connections through individuals often through social media sites such as Facebook,Twitter,LinkedIn and Google+. Social network is also a significant target area for marketers to seeking to engage users.social networking is also defined as the use of internet-based social media programs to make connections with friends, family, classmates, customers and clients.
Now let's move to social media, how is it explained?
A sociologist of Manchester school introduced the term "social network"and can be defined as:
A social network is a platform, an online service or a website designed to build, reflect,and organize social relationships.
What some are saying
Veil Buehner and palenchar(2007) make the argument that social media is at its core human communication,possessing characteristics of participation, openess, conversation, community, and connectedness.
They highlighted the fact that new media(the description applied to social media) is used in times of crisis to share and reshare information reaching millions of people without the intervening presence of journalists.
The authors also point out that news from sources known as social media are tremendous influential. And even perceived as more trustworthy than mainstream media in some instances.technology allows private individuals to become sources of information online "sharing opinions ,insights, experiences and perspective without others"
As social work educators and practitioners search for innovative ways to meet the mandate of promoting best practice models ,is important to examine the critical role that social media can play in accomplishing such goals.
It has been pointed out that social media offer easy ways to communicate,collaborate and share resources .
As social workers educators are practitioners explore opportunities for both instructional practice opportunities,it is important to be cognizant of the reality that platforms such as Facebook,Twitter,and YouTube can be used to find and provide critical information for course development as well as for conducting meaningful sessions with clients.
Main reasons for using social media
- Information gathering
- Networking discussion
- Broadcasting knowledge
- Personal and business development
- To reach our network without spending vast amount of money
- To support web activity
- Job promotion
- Communicating to target markets and influences
- Establishing myself as a worldwide expert
- Building trust with clients on a personal level
- Lead generations
- Managing contacts and keeping touch.
Like everything has good and bad parts, social media also has these two aspects. It can be very beneficial and on the other hand it can be very harmful to an individual. Using social media sites for marketing is very important. These social networking sites are an excellent channel to communicate with customers. Social networking sites are very useful, because of social networking it is very easy to communicate with a person miles away from you, say from another country, in seconds.
On the other hand social media lacks emotional connections, conveys in authentic expression of feelings and most of the children have become victims of cyber bulling over the past years. Threats, intimidation messages to create discomfort and chaos in the society. Many other disadvantages including hacking personal data and privacy can easily be hacked and shared on the internet. Several personal Twitter and Facebook accounts have been hacked in the past and the hacker had posted materials that have affected the individuals personal levels.
With the social media in hand we are able to create blogs, share information and have conversations. On a personal level and to broaden our professional network on a professional level social media is used for communication purposes. Nowadays social media is globally used by billions of people. Due to its use throughout the world it has helped social media to generate billions of dollars. The data shared by these billions of users is mostly used to gain the money. These social networking sites sell this data to the advertisers who in turn pay them money but this is not safe for the person who uses their network. And this should not happen and is not what a user deserves. A user deserves a better behavior from these companies. And because of this centralized nature of these networks people are being exploited. There's no data security on these networks and there no respect given to the privacy of the users.
All these bothering issues are eradicated by a platform that is based on blockchain technology. A network where your data is secured and your privacy is respected. A transparent system that is the future of social networking. It's sphere. Sphere's users are free to share whatever they want and they have the right and power to decide what to keep private and what to sell online. Sphere gives the power back to its users. Sphere shares some of the profit earned using the users' data. Sphere has many other positives to it. It's at its core a social media network.
Sphere has a marketplace as well where users cann buy and sell products within the network. To sell a product online on sphere's marketplace, one needs to mark a price tag on the product and the interested users can thus buy the product by clicking on the purchase button. These products can be bought and sold using sphere cryptocurrency known as Social Activity Tokens(SATs) and the process of addition and deduction will be done in no time.
Social Activity Tokens
SAT is a digital currency used to facilitate transactions within sphere. It's used for the trade within the decentralized network. SATs are ERC20 compliant and can be stored in wallets like Mist, Parity, MyEtherWallet and MetaMask. SAT is going to be listed on some key exchanges as well where we can trade it.
The value of 1 SAT =$0.14 USD
Initial Coin Offering(ICO)
Sphere's ICO started on 12th of February for four rounds and will end on 9th April this year. It's currently in its last round. The ICO is offering a bonus on purchases of SATs. You can be a part of the fund raising event by purchasing some tokens. Interested people can make it count now as it is expected that the price of the tokens is going to double after the ICO.
Referral Program
You can earn by referring a friend too. For every referral, sphere will award you 20 SATs and those who use your referral link to sign up will also be awarded 20 SATs.
You can sign up using my referral link
Sphere Bounty
For those of you who cannot buy the tokens, sphere has initiated a bounty program. It's there for the people to earn SATs as much as they can. The interested users can contribute in different categories and sphere will reward them for their contributions. The rewards will be in accordance to the content, quality, promotion and the effort put in by the users contributing in different categories. Your hard work can be rewarded immensely and it's one of the best and easy ways to earn these tokens.
Sphere Affiliate Program
If all those programs weren't enough to be benefited from, sphere recently initiated another program, Sphere Affiliate Program. In this program, a can earn 20% of the share for every purchase made by a referred user during the crowdsale.
App
Sphere has released its mobile app as well and you can download it for both android and ios
