Roles of Social Media on Information Sites

Table of content

1. Introduction

2. Literature Review

3. Methodology

4. Data/ Results
4.1.Sharing information
4.2. Trends of Social Media Used

5. Discussions

6. Future Research Directions and Limitations

7. Conclusions

REFERENCES

Abstract

Social media is a platform to share information that is very liked by everyone nowadays because some of the facilities that make it easier for us to communicate with each other, share documents, chat and even create a community. A data mining approach is used to determine the trends in social media as information in getting type of information; information sharing; and trends of social media used by different organizations. The results show that one's motivation in sharing information tends to be consistent for each type of information that is to share the impression of social media users on a matter.

Keywords: social media, information sharing, organizations

1. Introduction

Social media connect different races and making distant communication reachable in a shortest period of time. It has been trends already around the world to maximize the utilization of social media through variety of information sites. It is a very useful vehicle to gather data addressing the need of the internet citizens (netizens) in this contemporary era. with motivating features, essentialities and importance, there is a growing number of users interacting with online social networks (Stock, 2018).

The emerge of different sites making the social media continuously increasing its potential, to provide useful geographic information to either replace or augment traditional methods of data collection has been recognized for some years (Stock, 2018 ). It is not only data collection but sharing of information of the same interest which reveals the active interaction regardless of age. However, the increase of interactionposes a challenge to identify whether the trending media content is real or reflects the claimed description Hossain et al. (2017). Generally, social media is an active source of information seeking wherein users mest be tactful in determining the facts. With the help of some invented applications to determine and prevent malicious spam, statistical analysis of language to detect spam trending topics (Romo et al., 2013).

In this paper, the researchers collaboratively identifying the social media trends from the number of paper within scope, analyzing their content in order to synthesize from the variation of researches and determines the gap making this review a potential contributor for future researches. Included in this paper the most commonly used information sites which manifest convergent features.

2. Literature Review

The growing availability of high-speed Internet access further added to the popularity of the concept, leading to the creation of social networking sites such as MySpace (in 2003) and Facebook (in 2004). This, in turn, coined the term ‘‘Social Media,’’ and contributed to the prominence it has today (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2009). Social networking sites are applications that enable users to connect by creating personal information profiles, inviting friends and colleagues to have access to those profiles, and sending e-mails and instant messages between each other. These personal profiles can include any type of information, including photos, video, audio files, and blogs.

Social media is referred as an internet-based application created with Web 2.0 foundation that puts forward the creation and deployment of user generated content or user-generated cntent (Kaplan A & Haenlein, M., 2010). Users willingly share their identities on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, yet this does not mean they do not care what happens to this information. Indeed, users have serious concerns about how secondary firms use their information as a source for data mining and surveillance (Kietzmann & Angell, 2010), and the extent to which social media sites passively facilitate or actively encourage these activities. This has resulted in users and government agencies initiating class-action lawsuits for invasion of privacy (Kravets, 2010).

Motivational research shows that one's motivation to share information is consistent in the type of sensational, political, casual, and political information, which is to share the impression of social media users on a matter. Motivation for personal information is to maintain a person's connection or friendship. In addition, the motivation that is least compatible with social media users in Indonesia is to become better known (Afira Putri Ghaisani, Putu Wuri Handayani, 2017, Qorib Munajat, 2017). Performing data mining on social media is very potential and useful for extracting more information and gaining deeper insights about users so it is necessary to support activities such as interaction and analysis, information systems development, marketing, and analysis (Moro , Rita , Vala, 2016). It easier for us to communicate with each other, share documents, chat and even create a community. In addition, we can also analyze the content of social media by using several methods in data mining, so that we can get new the information to support decision making that can bring benefits to individuals and companies.

Social media data tends to appear mainly in the form of written contents (e.g. status updates, com-ments in reviews or social groups, conversations with other users),and in the form of likes or dislikes, shares, tags, hashtags, emoti-cons, video messages, personal information (e.g., number of friends ,citizenship, gender) and rating scores. (Kennedy, 2016). The study and development of data mining technique belongs to a discipline that emerged from data mining: social media mining(Zafarani, Abbasi, & Liu, 2014).

Social media is used to fulfill perceived social needs, but not all needs can be fulfilled by social media. For example, lonely individuals are more likely to use the Internet for emotional support than those who are not lonely (Wang, Z.; Tchernev, J. M.; Solloway, T., 2012). Sherry Turkle explores these issues in her book Alone Together as she discusses how people confuse social media usage with authentic communication. She posits that people tend to act differently online and are less afraid to hurt each other's feelings (Morahan-Martin, J.; Schumacher, P., 2003). Additionally, studies on who interacts on the internent have shown that extraversion and openness have a positive relationship with social media, while emotional stability has a negative sloping relationship with social media (Correa, Teresa; Hinsley, Amber W., 2009).

Social media becomes effective through a process called "building social authority". One of the foundation concepts in social media has become that you cannot completely control your message through social media but rather you can simply begin to participate in the "conversation" expecting that you can achieve a significant influence in that conversation (Tang, Qian; Gu, Bin; Whinston, Andrew B., 2012).

Social media content is generated through social media interactions done by the users through the site. There has always been a huge debate on the ownership of the content on social media platforms because it is generated by the users and hosted by the company. Added to this is the danger to security of information, which can be leaked to third parties with economic interests in the platform, or parasites who comb the data for their own databases (Jones, Harvey; Soltren, José Hiram, 2005).

Social media can enable companies to get in the form of greater market share and increased audiences. Internet bots have been developed which facilitate social media marketing has been developed. Bots are automated programs that run over the internet (Castronovo, Cristina, 2012) with the most important social media marketing examples being chatbots and social bots. Chatbots and social bots are programmed to mimic natural human interactions such as liking, commenting, following, and unfollowing on social media platforms (Rodrigo, S. and Abraham, J., 2012).

According to a 2016 article diving into the topic of sharing privately and the effect social media has on expectations of privacy, "1.18 billion people will log into their Facebookaccounts, 500 million tweets will be sent, and there will be 95 million photos and videos posted on Instagram" in a day. Much of the privacy concerns individuals face stem from their own posts on a form of social network. Users have the choice to share voluntarily, and has been ingrained into society as routine and normative. Social media is a snapshot of our lives; a community we have created on the behaviors of sharing, posting, liking, and communicating. Sharing has become a phenomenon which social media and networks have uprooted and introduced to the world (Murphy, Kate, 2014).

This paper tries to explore the popularity of the social media sites, the types of information-sharing activities involved on the social media sites in relation to information-sharing activities and to identify social media use and the information-sharing activities among in different organizations.

3. Methodology

A data mining approach is used to determine the trends in social media as information sites in getting type of information; information sharing; trends in social media used by different organizations. The sequence and composition of this paper are collaboratively discussed the previous reviews that have been conducted related to social media trends and related areas. Then, it provides the analysis in the social media trends for extracting an underlying pattern of interest in demographic data. Also, this shows discussions on the data and synthesizes the commonalities and other alternative trends and the most commonly used sites as an active source of data information.

Moreover, it analyses using trending analysis method from the revealed results and synthetically matching the data from the presented research papers and reviews. Lastly, this discusses on the future research directions and recommendations.

4. Data/ Results

4.1.Sharing information

Information sharing activities have a strong connection with knowledge-sharing activities. According to Ruggles, information sharing is an important element to support knowledge management in the organization11. This makes information sharing activity necessarily similar to knowledge-sharing activities. Wu et al. formulated knowledge sharing activities in social media in general that also apply to information-sharing activities i.e. information seekers identifying information needs; sending questions related to these needs in the form of messages on social media; comparing available answers to needs; if not in accordance with the needs of the searcher will continue to seek answer (Roch J & Mosconi E., 2016). Then, the answer will be shared with other users in social media (Ruggles R., 2012).

This research, where interactions between different social networks are measured, has never been conducted. The approach adopted in this research brings new insights multiple social networks.

Table 1 Data-driven social media study

Abbildung in dieser Leseprobe nicht enthalten

Lewis B., (2015) stated that the use of social media for personal activities is to maintain relationships with friends. The result for sensational information show the most preferred motivation is to share the impression on the internet. This result relates to the characteristics of sensational information that invite a person to share that information to get a certain impression (Vista A., 2015). Political information also provides similar result with sensational information, i.e. the most preferred motivation is to share the impression. Political information is the information shared by opinion and there are different views among individuals making the motivation to share the most chosen impression (Osatuyi B., 2013).

While the most chosen motivation for casual information and experience for respondents is also to share the impression. Casual information has a close relationship with the recommendation of a particular thing and makes the impression of social media users becomes the motivation of users to share information on social media. Sharing experience information to social media shows that users want to share an impression of a perceived experience in social media that can be addressed to other parties in general. It becomes the basis of the election of motivation to share the impression on the internet as the most appropriate for the respondents.

The results of data analysis show that the motivation obtained for all types of information tend to be consistent, that is to share the personal impression of social media users. In addition, the least compatible motivation is also consistent, that is to become better known. This result adds to the knowledge-related motivation of information sharing activities proposed by Munar and Jacobsen where Scandinavian tourists choose at least this motivation to gain recognition from others as a motivation to share information (Munar A & Jacobsen J., 2014). These results also show that Indonesian social media users share information with an intrinsic motivation.

4.2. Trends of Social Media Used

Social media usage among organizations is growing tremendously. Organizations are now building and maintaining social media public pages to improve their social network salience, enhance interest in their organizations, and build relationships with the online public. The majority of the studies on social media usage are based on the individual perspective while some are from the organizational perspective (Parvin, F., et al., 2014).

4.2.1. Social Media Mining

Social media "mining" is a type ofdata mining, a technique ofanalyzing datato detect patterns. Social media mining is a process of representing, analyzing, and extracting actionable patterns from data collected from people's activities on social media. Google mines data in many ways including using analgorithminGmailto analyze information in emails. This use of information will then affect the type of advertisements shown to the user when they use Gmail. Facebook has partnered with many data mining companies such asDatalogixandBlueKaito use customer information fortargeted advertising.Ethical questions of the extent to which a company should be able to utilize a user's information have been called "big data" (Qian; Gu, Bin; Whinston, Andrew B., 2012).Users tend to click through Terms of Use agreements when signing up on social media platforms, and they do not know how their information will be used by companies (Leaver, Tama, 2013). This leads to questions of privacy and surveillance when user data is recorded. Some social media outlets have added capture time andGeotaggingthat helps provide information about the context of the data as well as making their data more accurate.

Millions of people all over the world are constantly sharing an extremely wide range of fascinating, quirky, funny, irrelevant and important content all at once. Even scientists are no strangers to this trend. Social media has enabled them to communicate their research quickly and efficiently throughout each corner of the world. But which social media platforms are they using to communicate this research and how are they using them? One thing is clear: the range of social media platforms that scientists are using is relatively vast and dependent on discipline and sentiment. While the future of social media is unknown, a combination of educated speculation and persuasive fact points to the industry's continual growth and influence. Thus, is that not only are scientists utilizing social media to communicate their research, they must. The ability to communicate to the masses via social media is critical to the distribution of scientific information amongst professionals in the field and to the general population.

4.2.2. Social Media to Communicate Research

On any given day, 50% of Facebook's 500-million-plus users log-on to the social networking site. The average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events, and creates about 90 pieces of content for posting each month (Kietzmann, Jan H.; Kristopher Hermkens, 2011). Meanwhile, Twitter's 200 million registered users will produce 110 million tweets per day on topics ranging from CNN's breaking news to celebrity gossip and more (Obar, Jonathan A.; Wildman, Steve, 2015). Factoring in the social communities of YouTube, LinkedIn and Ted.Com equates the masses. The bottom line is that millions of people all over the world are constantly sharing an extremely wide range of fascinating, quirky, funny, irrelevant and important content all at once. Even scientists are no strangers to this trend. Social media has enabled them to communicate their research quickly and efficiently throughout each corner of the world. But which social media platforms are they using to communicate this research and how are they using them?

One thing is clear: the range of social media platforms that scientists are using is relatively vast and dependent on discipline and sentiments, particularly when it comes to mainstream social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. In 2007, BioInformatics LLC conducted a survey with regard to scientists and social messaging 77% of life scientists participated in some type of social media;50% viewed blogs, discussion groups, online communities, and social networking as beneficial to sharing ideas with colleagues;85% saw social media affecting their decision-making; discussion groups and message boards were still the most-used types of sites, but online communities were gaining fast; user-generated content is not completely trusted for product information, but it is more trusted than information in printed trade magazines, editorial web sites, or online portals (Andreas M.; Haenlein Michael, 2010).

While many expect scientists to use social media like most other professionals, the diverse sites they choose to use and their varied skepticism of mainstream social media might come as a surprise. Many scientists perceive Facebook and Twitter, for example, as unprofessional platforms that may compromise or threaten years of life-changing research. As Brian Krueger, founder of the blogging and social network site LabSpaces.net, puts it, "Social networks first began to take off in the late 90s, but the emergence of Facebook and Myspace in 2004 set a new trend for internet use. Although these sites have their merits, they don't provide an environment conducive to productivity.

LabSpaces began as my desire to provide a productive social network for science by creating a website to attract a diverse set of researchers for the sole purpose of increasing communication and collaboration in the sciences."Ellison, Nicole B. (2007) definedLabSpaces is one of many social networking platforms utilized by niche scientific professionals who appreciate the power of communicating to the masses, but want to do so inside the walls of a gated web community. For example, Surgytec is a social networking platform for MDs and PhDs in the medical sciences. Started by HPJ Stevens, MD, PhD, a plastic surgeon from Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Surgytec operates globally, providing an integrated platform of videos, e-learning courses, discussion rooms, and blog posts. It allows its community of the best medical practitioners and academic peers to collaborate and share findings on topics ranging from Early Detection and Diagnosis of Lung Cancer and Immune Circuitry to the use of medical serums, such as Golgi protein 73 (GOLPH2), as markers for hepatocellular abnormal cell growth in the body (Agichtein, Eugene; Carlos Castillo, Debora Donato; Aristides Gionis; Gilad Mishne, 2008).

It's not only individual scientific professionals who have averted main stream social media and launched "boutique" social networks. Nature Publishing Group founded Sciatble, a platform for scientists, teachers, researchers, and students to connect through group discussion boards, posting of articles, and e-trainings. Focused on genetics and cell biology, the site spotlights topics such as the ability of enzymes to perform various processes related to DNA sequences. The site's list of sponsors is admirable, as it boasts high-profile corporate partners such as Intel and Roche Applied Science, a division of Roche Diagnostics (Pavlik & MacIntoch, John and Shawn, 2015). Some scientists, however, have a soft spot for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other such social networking sites that naysayers might consider trendy and wasteful. Stephen Hawking, for example, is an avid user of Twitter, utilizing the 140-character limit messaging system on a weekly basis. Though his "tweets" aren't always related to scientific research, he is integrating himself into a vast community worldwide, and exposing parts of his authentic personality to each of his thousands of followers (Chapin, John, 2016). The hope, then, is that his scientific-based messages are "re-tweeted" and shared by these loyal followers, who feel they have come to know him as a person in addition to a brilliant scientist.

Likewise, Richard Dawkins, a famous British ethologist and evolutionary biologist, has two Facebook pages, one for Richard Dawkins the individual and one for his foundation, The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. With its mission to "Support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world, in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering," the Dawkins Foundation's Facebook page and its 250,000 fans broadcast a sea of messages, such as links to live video discussions on the Kalam Cosmological Argument or articles on the evolution of man.

Similar to Sciatble, Twitter and Facebook are pillars of communications strategies for major scientific corporations. NASA Connect is the organization's web page focused exclusively on social media. Under the sub-heading "Connect with NASA on Social Networking Sites" are icons for nearly every major social networking site in existence, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Gowalla, and YouTube. NASA even created its own "Tweetup group," which invites a portion of its 956,073 Twitter followers to go behind-the-scenes at NASA facilities and events to speak with scientists, engineers, astronauts, and managers. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory hosted the first NASA Tweetup on Jan. 21, 2009. The next Tweetup is scheduled to take place on Thursday and Friday, April 28 and 29. NASA will invite 150 of its Twitter followers to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the launch of the Space shuttle Endeavour, Mission STS-134, and to speak with fellow "Tweeps" and NASA personnel (Chapin, John, 2016).

Likewise, the National Geographic Society has grown its Facebook community from just under 2 million fans to more than 7 million fans in the span of a few short months. With a VP of Social Media within its ranks, the 123-year-old organization is dedicated to scientific outreach on a variety of community-based websites. Its daily messaging disseminates scientific information on the more than 7,000 islands in the vast archipelago east of Vietnam and the shrouded icy fog that turns to precipitation nightly on planet Mars. Accompanied by its world-renowned photography, the average post on the Society's Facebook page receives more than 3,000 "likes," indicating that its fan base is, indeed, absorbing the information provided. National Geographic's Facebook presence is also divisional, with individual pages dedicated to National Geographic Magazine, National Geographic's Global Action Atlas, Nat Geo Channel, and National Geographic Education (Peebles, E., 2014) .

Even organizations that we might not initially associate with science are seeing the grave importance of using social media to communicate scientific research. Internet search giant Google, and its philanthropic arm, Google.org, communicated its own motivators behind using social media for scientific communication: "In an effort to foster a more open, transparent and accessible scientific dialogue, we've started a new effort aimed at inspiring pioneering use of technology, new media and computational thinking in the communication of science to diverse audiences. Initially, we'll focus on communicating the science on climate change."

While the future of social media is unknown, a combination of educated speculation and persuasive fact points to the industry's continual growth and influence. Although the social media space started with only a small group of constituents, it has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry with rapid expansion to mobile devices. Supporting notions of social media's power and prevalence, President Barack Obama chose to make a policy speech earlier this year about the economy at none other than Facebook's headquarters (Edwards, B. 2016). Likewise, when Egypt's interim Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq stepped down from his post, the announcement was initially made by Egypt's new ruler, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, on its official Facebook page, allowing for immediate communication to its more than 700,000 "friends." When both the record-setting 8.9 magnitude earthquake and horrific tsunami hit Japan last March, millions rushed to social media sites to post news about loved ones, share photos and video footage, and even donate funds for relief efforts. Google launched a "Person Finder" web app to link victims with family members, and more than 7,000 records were entered on the actual day of the earthquake, March. By the very same afternoon, 9,000 earthquake-related videos and 7,000 tsunami-related videos had been uploaded to YouTube (Edwards, B., 2016).

Propelled by ground-breaking research, political unrest, and extreme natural disasters occurring worldwide, the popularity of the social media phenomenon is not waning - it is exploding. In short order, it has gone from functioning as a powerful influence over current events to a phenomenon that serves as a vital communications tool used for survival. The conclusion, thus, is that not only are scientists utilizing social media to communicate their research, they must. Whether it is within the cyber walls of a prestigious one-off or on the same platforms being used by 13-year-olds, the ability to communicate to the masses via social media is critical to the distribution of scientific information amongst professionals in the field and to the general population. There was a time when "social media" was considered superfluous, merely a tool to distract ourselves from real-time events and discussions. We must move past such stigmatisms and recognize social media's power in communicating advancements in the scientific field by acknowledging that successful communication can only be achieved by employing the channels in which the general public is currently engaged.

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