In order to compare the impact on society of each social network the first factor we need to compare is how many active users has each network. Facebook is in the top with 1700 million active users per month, then we find Instagram with 500 million active users per month, in third place Twitter with 400 million active users, and finally LinkedIn with 100 million active users per month. As we can see, Facebook’ active users duplicate the second social network active users, and therefore we can imagine how important Facebook is nowadays, and its impact to social and business communication.
The second factor to analyze is how a user can create a network in each of these Social networks. The behavior of Facebook and LinkedIn is similar and the same for Instagram and Twitter. In Facebook and LinkedIn if you want to add a person to your list of contacts, you need their approval, and once you have their approval both contacts are connected, for example, if I want to add Maria to my list of contacts and see what she is posting and know her activity I send her a “friend request” she has the opportunity to approve or rejected that request, in the case that Maria accepts the requested both can see each other profile information and activity. On another hand, Instagram and Twitter users use a different methodology to create a network; a user can follow another user and there is not “friend request” in this case it is just a user that want to know about the activity of another user, this means that the second user, the one that is been followed, does not necessarily follow the first one, for example if I want to follow Sam, I can do it and I will receive news about all his activity but he won’t receive any of my activity unless he decided to follow me back.
The last factor that I want to analyze is the kind of information that you can find in each social network. Starting with Facebook because it seems to be the most popular one nowadays. This social network is used to share personal experiences, users can share those experiences using images, videos, and written posts, in all of them you can specify the people with you (others Facebook users), the place, and how that makes you feel. On another hand, Instagram required a picture or a video in each post, in this case the picture or the video is the principal element of the post, and the written part is just a complement of the post. Twitter use another posting process, in twitter the principal component of the post is what you write and how you are able to summarize the message in 140 characters giving the option to answer other users post creating a kind of conversation, for this reason Twitter users frequently share opinions about different topics. As we know, LinkedIn is a “business” social network, in this case users are not sharing personal experiences or personal opinions they share articles, news and documents and comment them using a high written record.
Gala 