Unit 35 : LO1

2. Choice of social media products
Instagram is a photo-sharing app. You can take pictures within the app or use photos that already exist in
your camera roll. You can give your photo a title, enter a location and write a description about it.
Instagram was created on 6th October 2010. The mainly mobile photo sharing network had reached 500
million daily active users, up from 150 million in January 2017. The photo sharing app is set to generate
$3.2 billion U.S. dollars in global revenues throughout 2016.
Snapchat was founded through Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy. They were co-founders of Snapchat in
2011 and Spiegel is now the CEO of the very popular social media product. Snapchat was created around
the start of September 2011. The targets users of Snapchat are going to be teenagers/young adults. In
recent years it has turned over a $50 million dollar revenue and the next year a possible $200 million
dollar revenue. Estimated to be worth $3.8 billion U.S dollars.
Twitter The CEO for Twitter is Jack Dorsey and works with the executive team, he was also a co-founder of
Twitter as well as many other founders involved. Twitter was then created around the start of March
2006. 22.6% of Twitter users are under 25, 21.5% of adults aged 25-34. twitter can be used by all ages,
including the likes of Donald Trump and other major names in the world. Twitters revenue in previous
years have been well over $1.4 billion dollars.

3. Instagram – Purpose
Instagram is a photo-sharing app. You can take pictures within the app or use
photos that already exist in your camera roll. You can give your photo a title, enter
a location and write a description about it. There are four areas within Instagram,
the home page, explore page, notifications page and your profile. It allows you to
like your friends posts when they put it up, also allowing you to comment on their
posts also.

4. Instagram – Content
The old colour scheme of Instagram logo used to be brown and cream with the
camera lens in the middle, within the app the colour scheme used to be blue. The
new updated versions logo is a mixture of purple, red, yellow and orange, also
within the app they have changed to just white within the app.
You can easily navigate yourself around the app, the four page icons are at the
bottom of the app. You can scroll up and down on your home page, the explore
page you can search up famous people or your friends profiles. The notifications
page notifies you when people have liked your post or commented on your post.
Also notifies you on your new followers. You can have your Instagram profile public
or private. Public will allow people to follow you whenever and private will notify of
people that want to follow you and you can the choose to accept or decline the
request.

5. Instagram – Target User/Membership
The mainly mobile photo sharing network had reached 500
million daily active users, up from 150 million in January 2017.
This app is one of the most popular social networks worldwide.
In April 2017, Instagram announced 700 million monthly active
users.
If you don’t have an account you need to sign up when you get to
this page when opening the app. You do this by inserting your
mobile number or email, full name, username and your
password. Your username and password will then be used every
time when you have previously logged out of Instagram and are
wanting to log back in.

6. Instagram – Sources of Revenue
Projected revenue of Instagram from 2015 to 2021. This statistic presents an
estimate of the social network Instagram's revenue from 2015 to 2021. According
to sources, the photo sharing app is set to generate $3.2 billion U.S. dollars in
global revenues throughout 2016.
How does Instagram make money, if its free?
Instagram makes money through various advertisements, exactly like Facebook.
Facebook and Instagram financials do not break out each other, but Facebook
overall are resulting about 93% of its fourth quarter revenue from advertisements.
The Advertisement revenue that occurred during that quarter was around $3.6
billion US dollars.

7. Instagram – Legal and Ethical
Like any other social media brand, there are both advantages and disadvantages. The positives
consist of one of the most important is their privacy policy. This is because if you set your account to
private settings, if someone want to follow you, they have to send a request to you in order to
follow you, and this is when you decide whether you decline or accept there request.
This idea is very clever because it is going to reduce the risk of anyone who may cause offence to
look at your account and post harmful things about you on your images.
As for the negative, although it may seem fine to anyone using a location tag, it can be very
dangerous in the way that if you are young. This is because of any of your followers or if your
account isn't private will know where you are. Due to private messaging on Instagram, this could
lead to explicit images and content being sent to you which can also backfire on other brands such
as Snapchat. As popularity increases for Instagram or other social medias, the negatives will
increase because people will find new problems with the app that causes a big discussion.

8. Snapchat – Purpose
Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy were co-founders of Snapchat in 2011 and Spiegel
is now the CEO of the very popular social media product. The pair met at Stanford
University where Evan Spiegel was studying product design and Bobby Murphy
math's. Before Snapchat became extremely popular they tried to create a very
similar app which was called Picaboo but didn't become as well known so they
decided to rename is Snapchat.

9. Snapchat – Content
On the social media app, there are a lot of different pages you can go onto. For
example, the discovery page, friends stories, camera, your chats and your profile
you can all go onto. The main colours used within the app are white, yellow, blue,
red and purple.
Connotations behind the colours used are that it sends of a very vibrant message
within the app and outside of the app to whoever has not downloaded it yet. All
information of on pages are in a very simple layout and are not complex one bit.
On the stories page, it has organised features such as recent updates and
underneath it has stories you have already seen so that you haven't got to keep on
looking through them.

10. Snapchat – Target User/Membership
The targets users of Snapchat are going to be teenagers/young adults or anyone
who has access to a phone or tablet e.g. iPad. This is because it allows people to
contact people from all around the world, look at there stories from the discovery
page and so forth.
A lot of features have become very popular throughout Snapchat but the most
popular one is the use of new stories.
Stories have organised features such as recent updates and underneath it has
stories you have already seen so that you haven't got to keep on looking through
them.

11. Snapchat – Sources of Revenue
Although Snapchat has not been around for long, it has been said that this year
they will have a $50 million dollar revenue and the next year a possible $200
million dollar revenue. With this amount of revenue, Snapchat is reportedly valued
at $3.8 billion dollars.
The reason for Snapchat's huge amount of revenue is mainly down to their
sponsored lenses, this is where people can use there front camera on themselves
and add filters to alter there face with funny images that are set on Snapchat.
These filters change throughout the updates and will become more complex and
hilarious as time goes on.

12. Snapchat – Legal and Ethical
Many people can have mixed views on Snapchat. Positives of Snapchat are that it is
something new and not like any other social media brands. It promotes a good way
to stay in touch with others that you may not always stay in touch with. Also some
like the idea that they do not last forever and you can how long your “snaps” last
for. However, Snapchat is increasingly being used as a “sexting” app, through the
fact that a lot of people are sending inappropriate, explicit images to others, then
they will screenshot these images and send it round the school etc. where that
individual that sent the image may go to. This is therefore getting extremely
dangerous for many young users because they then will feel under pressure to send
them and this almost promotes unconventional behaviour.

13. Twitter – Purpose
Twitters mission statement is “to give everyone power to create and share ideas
and information instantly, without barriers”. This means that people should be able
to freely share what they think about something or someone and the best part
being that it is instantly sent to the worlds social media.
The CEO for Twitter is Jack Dorsey and works with the executive team, he was also
a co-founder of Twitter as well as many other founders involved. Peter Chernin is
another example of a founder. Twitter was created in Spring 2006 so it has only
been around for 9 years.

14. Twitter – Content
As you can see, Twitter has a very simple colour scheme of blue and white and then
a little bit of grey. You can also change the daylight scheme of your Twitter to night
light, so instead of it being blue and white when you get into the app, its dark grey
and blue. These colour scheme make the app look more slick and will attract more
people to go and download it as there is not a lot of complexity in it.
The homepage is set out as your timeline with side bars so that you can see
everything that is being tweeted. The navigation bar has links to the homepage,
notifications, messages, search bar, profile and tweet button.

15. Twitter – Target User/Membership
Twitters target user are for all ages, you have Donald Trump tweeting about
something, then a teenager tweeting about something, Twitter is used for all ages
to tweet about something that is going on or to directly message someone
privately. Over the years more and more tweets have been posted every day and
more and more of them are getting portrayed positively or negatively.
6000 tweets are being made per second, which makes it 500 million tweets every
day and around 200 billion tweets per year. This proves that Twitter is increasingly
popular and is continuing to grow even more. 22.6% of Twitter users are under 25,
21.5% of adults aged 25-34. This means that the majority of users are young adults
and this is the main target audience for Twitter.

16. Twitter – Sources of Revenue
Twitters revenue in previous years have been well over $1.4 billion dollars which
means for numbers before that has increased to 111.01% and their gross income
being $956.69 million dollars which equals to 140.27% increase.
Twitter can gain a lot of income through various advertisement deals. They have a
variety of selection with regards to how they want to advertise there social media.
If they want to promote via tweets, it will cost them around $2.00 dollars. If they
were wanting to promote it via accounts, it will cost them around $4.00 dollars.
However the most expensive type of advertisement is if you are wanting to
promote through trends. This means to be able to have your own promoted
hashtag, which will cost around $200,000 dollars a day.

17. Twitter – Legal and Ethical
There are many advantages to using Twitter, although there are also many
disadvantages. Advantages such as making sure there is no false information on the
site, they have decided to verify certain accounts for celebrities, to let people know
that the verified accounts are the celebrities proper accounts. Also the character
limit on tweets it set to 140 characters.
This can also be a disadvantage also as they feel they are restricted to what they
have to say and shorten words down into short hand. Also Twitter is more based
around the ideas of a tweet rather than the visual content that is involved. A lot of
the time celebrities have Twitter feuds that cause a major argument with the
celebrities and there fans.

18. Data Protection Act (1998)
Data Protection Act 1998 is a UK Act of Parliament that is designed to protect
personal data stored on computers or in an organised filing system. It controls how
your personal information is used by various organisations, businesses or the
government.
The act defines personal data as information that is related to a individual who
could then be identified from specific pieces of data or a combination of various
pieces of data. The DPA provides protection for sensitive types of personal data,
which is then defined as information that is relating to that persons racial or ethnic
origin, religious beliefs, there physical or mental health conditions, sex life or any
criminal convictions that they may have upon there name.

19. Data Protection Act (1998) on social media
Social networking sites such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, which allow
users to share there personal profiles and other information such as photographs,
as well as in order to exchange messages, have become extremely popular. There
are various types of user-generated content, where online content is produced and
submitted by users of the service.
The DPA says that if they post personal data on their own or a third parties website.
If they download and use personal data from a third party website and if they run a
website which allows third parties to add various different comments or posts
about living individuals, and they are a data controller for the website content.
They cannot use section 36 of the DPA to share responsibilities for something that
isn't there's.

20. Features and content that excite user and offer benefits to
consumers
Snapchat
• You can see your friends stories to see what they're up to on that specific day
• You have the ability to read through news through featured articles and then can subscribe to them also so
that they come up first and you can read them straight away
• You can see stories from around the world such as festivals etc.
Instagram
• You can see our friends stories to see what they're up to
• You can view live streams of your friends or celebrities
• You are able to like friends posts and comment on them
Twitter
• You can directly message someone if you wanted to get chatting to them
• You can send out tweets to your friends for them then to see
• You can retweet tweets from other people, for example, if it was something about the recent disaster in
Manchester, you could retweet and celebrities tweet

21. Features and content that come as dangers to the user and the
consumer
Snapchat
Being able to track people through the map, a lot of people have said this is a major danger. It is known that a
lot of people have been tracking people down through Snapchat in order to find them. There is a way you can
stop this and that is by putting the map mode on ghost so that your profile comes off the map and then people
cannot find you. Although there is a solution for it, a lot people will not know how to turn it off and may result
in results of this leading to danger through searching on “Snap Maps”.
Instagram
Some people may end up getting bullied within the app. This might be because of the image that they posted.
This may then lead them to start cyber bullying the individual just because of the image that they had put up.
There are many ways of cyber bullying through Instagram such as directly messaging them, commenting on
there posts inappropriate and mean words.
Twitter
Some people may end up getting bullied within the app. This might be because of something they tweeted.
Some people may feel whatever they tweeted is wrong or inappropriate. Then people will feel the need to
send harsh messages to them and result in cyber bullying them.

22. In this question I asked “which age range do you come under?”. The reason me asking this question was to just get a
rough outline of what age range were answering my survey. 12.5% of the respondents were aged 12-15. 62.5% were
aged 16-19 and the rest of the respondents of which were 25% aged at 24+. Once I had got the ages of the people
answering my survey this would give me a rough idea of what my target audience would look like when creating my
social media page.

23. In this question I asked “what gender are you?”. I asked because I wanted to find out what genders were also
answering so I could take it into consideration. 25% of respondents answered Male, another 25% of respondents
answered Female. Finally, 50% of respondents answered with unspecified or would rather not say. Once I had got
my answers, this would be able to help me implement features of Male and Female similarities when creating the
social media page.

24. In this question I asked “what social media platforms do you use?”. The reason why I asked this question was
because I wanted to find out what social media platforms my audience use. When answering this question it was
multiple choice where you could choose more than 1 answer. All 8 respondents said that they use Instagram. The
least used social media is Twitter with only 2 respondents saying that they use it. This tells me that I should make a
social media that implements more of Instagram features as it is clearly the most popular form or social media.

25. In this question I asked “what is your preferred social media platform?”. The reason for asking this question was
because I wanted to know what there preferred social media was so that I can base my social media around there
preferred platforms. The most popular answer was Snapchat, I believe that currently Snapchat is the most popular
platform that is used in todays markets.

26. Noam Chomsky – effects of social media
Chomsky believed that social media ‘erodes normal social behaviour’. From my research I think that
time spent viewing social media can affect a persons perspective of the world around them. This
can often lead to people behaving or thinking in ways they would not usually do. For example, a
LAPD officer posted an image and comment online with regards to his personal opinion of
protestors which was not appropriate as a law enforcement officer who should be seen to be
neutral about the public. Chomsky also thinks that social media causes unnecessary distraction
leading to a decrease in productivity either in the work place or in school.
Stanley Cohen (1972) also feels that social media can contribute towards ‘moral panic’ as those
reading posts such as that placed by the LAPD officer might then think that all police officers feel
the same why thus decreasing the level of trust the public have for police in general.

27. Commercial uses of advertising
Pay per click advertising
This is a type of advertisement where search engines such as “Google” give the opportunity for
businesses to pay for listing within the internet so that their website will then be a lot higher up on
the results when people are searching. The business will then agree an amount of money to be
charged that they will have to pay for each click that on their website.
Sponsored advertising
This is where a business will be able to sponsor an event. This sued a lot more recently as when
adverts are on the different websites people are not interested but as this is on an event that they
are interested in it is more likely that they will click on the advertisement therefore attracting more
interest.
Personal recommendations
This advertisement strategy is the most trustworthy and common, also being very effective. This is
due to the fact that if someone uses a product then shares their own individual opinion about how
good a product is and how people are going to rate it.

28. Commercial uses for advertising – how people
use for viral marketing
Viral marketing is marketing method where consumers are encouraged to share
information about a company’s goods or services via the internet.
Twitters advert was when the world cup was starting and they were promoting
their brand by using hashtags to get people involved in the upcoming event. You
can tell that it was a viral advert through the amount of views that the advert got. I
got over 1 million views. This advert was a little longer that usual, this advert ran to
1 minute and 12 seconds, usually adverts are only as long as 30 seconds. They did
this so that they could capture the audience attention with a slightly longer advert,
which allowed them to have more information within the advert.

29. Product advertising
Throughout Snapchat you have a lot of advertisements appear when looking
through your stories. Various adverts will appear as they try to capture the
attention of the user that is looking through there stories. Companies will contact
Snapchat to ask whether they can put there product on a advertisement story for
the user to possibly view unexpectedly.
The same goes for Instagram and Twitter, various companies will want to advertise
there company and they can do this without any criteria that you need to run by.
For example, Apple Music will advertise various new albums on Twitter and
Instagram as they know that a lot of people use these social medias worldwide.

30. Product reviews
A way of advertising products out to the public is through reviews. For example, in
the App Store on Apple products, you can leave reviews on apps that you have
downloaded and leave reviews through star rating or give your own reply on what
you think about the product. This will then encourage people to look at the apps
reviews before finally downloading. If you aren't looking at possible reviews, you
may get into the app and dislike the app, and think why they didn't look at various
reviews first.

31. Conclusion
To conclude, I have bene researching three of the most popular apps
out there in the modern world today. I have been gathering
information about there purpose, content, target audiences etc. it was
very important that I looked at positives and negatives of these three
apps. This will come into consideration when I go to create my social
media app. I also researched about product reviews and product
advertisement within these apps and finally, analysing results that I got
when asking my peers about there social medias.