Social Media

Bernard H. Alimon
The Social Media

What is Social Media?

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. The Office of
Communications and Marketing manages the
main Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, 
YouTube and Vimeo accounts.

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Key Principles for Social Media Managers:
• Social media is about conversations, community,
connecting with the audience and building
relationships. It is not just a broadcast channel or a
sales and marketing tool.
• Authenticity, honesty and open dialogue are key.
• Social media not only allows you to hear what people
say about you, but enables you to respond. Listen first,
speak second.
• Be compelling, useful, relevant and engaging. Don’t be
afraid to try new things, but think through your efforts
before kicking them off.

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Popular Social Media Tools and Platforms:
• Blogs: A platform for casual dialogue and discussions on a specific topic or opinion.
• Facebook: The world’s largest social network, with more than 1.55 billion monthly active users
(as of the third quarter of 2015). Users create a personal profile, add other users as friends,
and exchange messages, including status updates. Brands create pages and Facebook users can
“like” brands’ pages.
• Twitter: A social networking/micro-blogging platform that allows groups and individuals to stay
connected through the exchange of short status messages (140 character limit).
• YouTube & Vimeo: Video hosting and watching websites.
• Flickr: An image and video hosting website and online community. Photos can be shared on
Facebook and Twitter and other social networking sites.
• Instagram: A free photo and video sharing app that allows users to apply digital filters, frames
and special effects to their photos and then share them on a variety of social networking sites.
• Snapchat: A mobile app that lets users send photos and videos to friends or to their “story.”
Snaps disappear after viewing or after 24 hours. Currently, we are not allowing individual
departments to have Snapchat accounts, but asking that they contribute to the Tufts University
account.
• LinkedIn Groups: A place where groups of professionals with similar areas of interest can share
information and participate in a conversations.

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RESEARCH AND INFORMATION SEEKING
A search engine is a software system that is designed to carry
out web searches (Internet searches), which means to search
the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular
information specified in a textual web search query. The search
results are generally presented in a line of results, often referred
to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information may
be a mix of links to web pages, images, videos, info graphics,
articles, research papers, and other types of files. Some search
engines also mine data available in databases or open directories
. Unlike web directories, which are maintained only by human
editors, search engines also maintain real-time information by
running an algorithm on a web crawler. Internet content that is
not capable of being searched by a web search engine is
generally described as the deep web.

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Google
With over 75 percent of the search market share, one hardly needs to
introduce readers to Google. However, it clearly needs to head up any list
of search engines.
Created as a research project in 1996 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page,
they offered to 
sell their engine in 1999 to Excite for a whopping $750,000. The offer was
rejected putting Google at the top of my list of “bad business calls” as
well. Google’s parent company Alphabet is now worth about $650 billion.
Apart from powering their own search results, Google also provides
the search results for a wide array of other engines, including the old
favorite Ask.com.

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YouTube
YouTube was founded in 2005 by veterans of PayPal and was purchased
just over a year later by none other than Google, giving it control over the
top two search engines on this list.
YouTube receives more than 1.5 billion logged in users per month and
feeds over 1 billion hours of video each day to users (that’s right… billion).
If you’re curious about the first video uploaded (which has over 41 million
views) it’s a 19-second clip of co-founder Jawed Karim at the zoo. Not
exactly MTV playing “Video Killed the Radio Star”, but it got the job
done.

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Amazon

Amazon was launched in 1995 and, thus, is considered as

one of the first large companies to sell goods online. They
started out selling books online but expanded rapidly. In
1999, founder Jeff Bezos won Time’s Person of the Year
 for making online shopping popular and accessible.
So successful is Amazon, that last year more than half of all
online shopping searches began not at Google but 
at Amazon. Combine this with their 
acquisition of Whole Foods, which gives them access to
fresh foods, and one can be pretty sure we’ll see this
number continue to climb.
 
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Facebook

In 2006, Facebook (as we know it) was born. From 2004 until
then, it was accessible only by students and in 2006, it was
opened up to the world.
It’s not a natural go-to when thinking of search engines,
however, last year it surpassed 2 billion searches/day putting
it ahead of Bing.
With more than 1.5 billion logged in visitors per month,
Facebook also gives businesses and advertisers incredible
market access and tends to be where people are when they’re
not working (present company excluded obviously), meaning
they may be in a better situation to follow their nose and get
side-tracked by your offering if it’s of interest.
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Microsoft Bing

Bing replaced MSN Search as Microsoft’s answer to

Google in 2009. Launching with just 8.4 percent of the
search market share, they quickly crossed 10 percent,
and in a deal later that year to power Yahoo search, 
rose to 28.1 percent. In 2016, they added AOL to the
sites they provide search results for.

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Baidu

Baidu was founded in 2000 and is the dominant search

engine in China with over 82 percent market share
where Google comes in at 0.61 percent and Bing at
0.37 percent.
 

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Yandex

Yandex has its roots in a project started by two Russian

developers to aid in the classification of patents in 1990
under the company Arkadia.
Given below is a list of some of the best academic
search engines that will help you get the research
material you want quickly and easily, and without
compromising on quality.

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Academic Info
Academic Info contains an in-depth directory of the most useful links and resources within a
specific subject area. You can browse through this website to get a list of useful academic websites
for research. This site also offers online degrees, online courses and distance learning information
from a selection of online accredited schools.
 
iSeek Education
iSeek is easily one of the best and widely used search engines for academic research on the
internet. It has been especially designed keeping the students, teachers and scholars in mind. This
search engine shows only reliable and relevant results that ultimately save your time and enable
you to get your work done quickly. You can find safe, authoritative, intelligent and time-saving
resources with iSeek.
 
Virtual LRC
Virtual LRC or The Virtual Learning Resources Center allows you to explore educational sites with
high-quality information. It has indexed thousands of academic information websites. On top of
that, with custom Google search, you will be able to get more refined results, which will help you
complete your research in less time. It has been organized by teachers and library professionals
around the world to provide students with great resources for academic assignments and
projects. In short, Virtual LRC is the best place to start looking for research material that can help
you in your studies.

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Refseek
Refseek is an academic search engine which is simpler than Google even in appearance. Refseek
does not claim to offer more results than Google. Instead, it removes results that are not related
to science, academia and research. The best thing about Refseek is that you can search for
information related to your subject without getting distracted by sponsored links. With a database
of over one billion documents, web pages, books, journals, newspapers, online encyclopedias and
articles, Refseek is your ultimate companion for academic research.
 
Google Scholar
As the name suggests, Google Scholar is an academic search engine from the house of Google.
Especially designed to search for scholarly literature, it helps you find relevant information from
the world of scholarly research. With Google Scholar, you can explore many sources such as
books, dissertations, articles and abstracts from various academic publishers, professional
societies, universities and other websites. In May 2014, third-party researchers estimated that
Google Scholar database contains roughly 160 million documents.

Microsoft Academic Search

Microsoft Academic Search is a great search engine from the software giant Microsoft. It gives you
the ability to explore more than 38 million publications. One of the best features of this search
engine is that it provides trends, graphs and maps for your academic research. It contains more
than 40 million publications and 20 million authors.

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A massive open online course (MOOC /muːk/) is an online course aimed
at unlimited participation and open access via the Web.[1] In addition to
traditional course materials, such as filmed lectures, readings, and 
problem sets, many MOOCs provide interactive courses with user forums
or social media discussions to support community interactions among
students, professors, and teaching assistants (TAs), as well as immediate
feedback to quick quizzes and assignments. MOOCs are a widely
researched development in distance education,[2] first introduced in 2008,
[3]
 that emerged as a popular mode of learning in 2012.[4][5][6]
Early MOOCs (cMOOCs) often emphasized open-access features, such as 
open licensing of content, structure and learning goals, to promote the
reuse and remixing of resources. Some later MOOCs (xMOOCs) use

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 Google
An employment website is a website that deals specifically with employment or careers.
Many employment websites are designed to allow employers to post job requirements
for a position to be filled and are commonly known as job boards. Other employment
sites offer employer reviews, career and job-search advice, and describe different job
descriptions or employers. Through a job website a prospective employee can locate
and fill out a job application or submit resumes over the Internet for the advertised
position.
 
E-commerce
 
E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the buying and selling of goods and services, or
the transmitting of funds or data, over an electronic network, primarily the internet.
These business transactions occur either as business-to-business (B2B), business-to-
consumer (B2C), consumer-to-consumer or consumer-to-business. The terms e-
commerce and e-business are often used interchangeably. The term e-tail is also
sometimes used in reference to the transactional processes that make up online retail
shopping.
In the last decade, widespread use of e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and eBay
has contributed to substantial growth in online retail. In 2007, e-commerce accounted
for 5.1% of total retail sales; in 2019, e-commerce made up 16.0%.

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 Google

Social Etiquette in real life is ingrained into culture, although etiquette in

technology, commonly referred to as netiquette, is a fairly recent concept. The rules of
etiquette that apply when communicating over the Internet are different from those
applied when communicating in person or by audio (such as telephone) or videophone.
It is a social code that is used in all places where one can interact with other human
beings via the Internet, including text messaging, email, online games, Internet forums, 
chat rooms, and many more.
It can be a challenge to communicate on the Internet without misunderstandings mainly
because input from facial expressions and body language is absent in cyberspace.
Therefore, several rules, in an attempt to safeguard against these misunderstandings
and to discourage unfriendly behavior, are regularly put in place at many websites, and
often enforced by moderation by the website's users or administrators.

Unsafe surfing can also lead to other threats—from embarrassing personal comments or
images that, once online, are nearly impossible to erase, to getting mixed up with
people you'd rather have had nothing to do with.

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