Dr. Vera Petrovna Butkouskaya

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Uses of Social Networks as a projection of personal and business life / Students-generated content

Using social media as a millennial is the most normal thing you can do.

Most of us post daily. Be it on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, the three most used social media platforms by millennials.

We share different life experiences, from travel pictures on Facebook to a simple Insta Story about our days spent in the library studying. But as it happens with everything, tendencies exist.

And tendencies are what, in the end, we as users follow.

That is what we are going to talk about in this article. Tendencies and types of content millennials follow on social media, the most talked about topics and how the use of certain platforms has changed over the years.

Instagram

1The format is beautiful, especially the new logo, when we post the pictures they are good quality and don’t become grainy, and with the app changing all the time to include new features like chat, location aspects, and all sorts of cool aspects, Instagram is perfect for those who want their beautiful pictures to last for more than ten seconds and important messages to be more than just a couple characters long.

For the past year, I have been getting used to the IG lifestyle which includes liking everything (because I follow my friends to actually like their stuff, why else?), posting nice pictures, and even becoming accustom to “The Gram’s” language. While doing this, I have noticed there are quite a few trends especially for my fellow millennial generation.

Within these trends, the most popular and posted pictures by millennials are:

  • #selfie.
  • The not #selfie but still is a picture of you.
  • The adorable significant other pictures.
  • The Throwbacks.
  • The #transformationtuesdays.
  • Food pics
  • The natural ones.
  • The holidays.
  • National Something Day.

2But one of the most important things when it comes to millennial trends that completely change a behaviour are food pictures because not only are we using the photo-sharing social network to document what we’re eating, we’re using it to decide where to eat too. 

According to research by Zizzi, 18-35-year-olds spend five whole days a year browsing food images on Instagram, and 30 percent would avoid a restaurant if their Instagram presence was weak.

It appears traditional newspaper and magazine restaurant reviews are losing their influence over millennials in favour of online round-ups, social networks and influencers.

Facebook

3When it comes to social networks, Facebook was found to be the most popular social network among both millennials and non-millennials, as 41 percent of millennial respondents and 49 percent of non-millennial respondents said they use Facebook every day.

4The fact is that millennials continue to use Facebook, although they do seem to be diversifying their activity among additional social media platforms.

When it comes to using Facebook:

  • Millennials use Facebook differently than adults.Most millennials don’t use Facebook widely as a social networking platform. We see it as a news-curation feed, and we post less frequently than adults, using it only to broadcast announcements to friends to show support for things they care about.
  • Millennials update their profile pages infrequently. M tend to lurk way more than they post.
  • Millennials post less publicly but are more active privately. Millennials actively use Facebook Chat and Groups.
  • For better or worse, it’s the social web of their lives. Today’s millennials are the first generation of true digital natives.

Twitter

5As far as Twitter goes, millennials have embraced it for a few reasons:

  • To learn about currents trends. Millennials want to know what’s going on, and they want to be up to date. They suffer from a condition known as FOMO (fear of missing out). But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it keeps them in tune with the most current trends, the latest gossip, the hottest fashions, and the newest technology.
  • To cure boredom and get a good laugh. Entertainment value is one of the big draws that brings millennials to Twitter.
  • To utilize hashtags at live events. A way of documenting live events and tracking current stories.

It is the best platform to stay up to date of current events all over the world thanks to its format of live posting.

Some popular hashtags for millennials on twitter are:

#4charity

#causes

#donate

#change

#activism

#nonprofit

#Millennial

#love

#makeup

Even if it might seem surprising, these are the main types of content millennials post on twitter: politics & government top the list, with 47% of millennials sharing such content, more than twice the rate of the general population. Politics and government is trailed by family & parenting (38%), food & drink (34%), style & beauty (32%), culture & religion (31%), business (31%) and technology (30%).

This shows that millennials are worried about social issues, they use Twitter to engage and learn from others and are interested in making a real change in the world.

As a conclusion, we can say that the use of social media is essential for millennials and that it has changed the way we act and the way we view the world. We use social media platforms as a way to present ourselves and we value the image brands and businesses have on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. We use it to inform ourselves of current events and to learn about diverse and different topics.

Infographics

Content is generated by students: Mónica Arrondo, Maria Garcia, Esther Mayor, Alex Vega, Lian Zhu