Usage Of Social Media Platforms Research Articles

COVID-19 pandemic lockdown: An emotional health perspective of Indians on Twitter.

Background:Novel corona virus (2019-nCoV) has spread in the world since its first human infection in December 2019. India has also witnessed a rising number of infections since March 2020. The Indian government imposed lockdowns in the nation to control the movement of its citizens thereby confining the spread of the virus. Tweeters resorted to usage of social media platform to express their mind.Aim:Through this article, an attempt has been made to understand the mind-set of Indian people using Python and R statistical software, during the recent lockdown 2.0 (15 April 2020 to 3 May 2020) and lockdown 3.0 (4 May 2020 to 17 May 2020) through their tweets on the social media platform Twitter. Also, opinion on e-commerce during this pandemic has been analysed.Method:Analysis has been performed using Python and R statistical software. Also, recent articles related to COVID-19 have been considered and reviewed.Result:Although the country had a positive approach in lockdown 2.0 with only few instances of sadness, disgust and others, the majority of the people had a negative approach in lockdown 3.0.Conclusion:This analysis can help the health specialists to understand people’s mind-set, the authorities to take further corresponding measures in washing out the virus and the e-commerce stakeholders to adapt to the changing attitudes by adjusting demand and supply plans accordingly.

Lockdown: A Focus on Emotions & Coping in Adolescents

Objective: The COVID lockdown has been the most significant life-changing experience this year. The sudden implementation of measures such as social distancing, closure of institutions, and restriction of movement may have affected the psychological well-being of adolescents. Keeping this in mind the present exploratory pilot study is an attempt to study and determine the psychological impact on adolescents during the lockdown. Material and Method: Data was collected from a sample of 461 adolescent respondents aged 14 to 20 years through an online survey Statistical Analysis: Descriptive statistics and Spearman’s correlation in SPSS version 24 Results: The majority of the study population (85.7%) reported happiness or a relaxed state of mind, and the next common emotion was boredom. Amongst the 69% of participants also conveyed that stressful/negative thoughts, lack of direct contact with friends were the predominant stressor. Coping behaviors highlighted were spending time with family (93.6%), communicating with friends (96.1%), engaging in hobbies (88.7%), talking to relatives (79.6%), studying (72.7%), and exercising (70.9%). In contrast, the majority (73.3%) indulged in excessive sleep or increased usage of social media platforms or apps. Conclusion: This study is the only survey to document adolescents’ mental health in India during the Covid-19 lockdown. The study highlights that happiness and boredom reflected the young mind of these adolescents, and significantly only one third reported any physical or mental health impact with the lockdown.

THE IMPACTS OF FIRM CHARACTERISTICS ON SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE OF SMEs: EVIDENCE FROM THE CZECH REPUBLIC

Comparing to larger businesses, SMEs face more barriers in their marketing operations since they have a lower amount of financial resources and assets. But the emergence of social media platforms has provided many chances for them to overcome these barriers by enabling them to do marketing and promotion activities. Although these social media channels are easy to access by each of their users, awareness, perceptions, capabilities of SMEs might differ when using these platforms. In this regard, this research aims to analyze and find out whether social media usage differs among SMEs regarding their age and size. In parallel with this purpose, the researchers used an online questionnaire to collect data from 454 Czech SMEs. These SMEs were selected by applying a random sampling method and then an online questionnaire was directed to the respondents who were owners and managers of these enterprises. To analyze the data, the researchers performed an Independent T-test in SPSS statistical program. According to the results, social media usage does not differ between smaller-larger and younger-older SMEs. The reasons for these similarities among SMEs might stem from the industry that they operate, the cost of social media usage, and the age of younger firms’ executives. Nonexistence of the differences among analyzed Czech SMEs makes this paper differ from other studies. Some policy implementations are also offered by the researchers to increase awareness, skills, and usage of social media platforms by SMEs.

Social media use disorder and loneliness: any association between the two? Results of a cross-sectional study among Lebanese adults

BackgroundIn Lebanon, it is already established that mental disorders are prevalent among the population. Lebanese people are active users of social media platforms. To date, no study has previously explored the relationship between mental health and social media use disorder in Lebanon. The present study aims to learn more about the link between social media use disorder and loneliness among Lebanese people.MethodsThis cross-sectional study was carried out between January and December 2018. It enrolled 456 residents of the community randomly selected from Lebanon’s governorates in a proportionate rate.ResultsThe results showed that 107 (23.7%) participants were classified as having social media use disorder. The results of a stepwise linear regression, taking the loneliness score as the dependent variable, showed that female gender compared to males (Beta = 0.42), having a secondary level of education compared to illiteracy (Beta = 0.65), higher social media use disorder (Beta = 0.03) and higher insomnia (Beta = 0.02) and alexithymia (Beta = 0.02) were significantly associated with higher loneliness.ConclusionThe present study was able to contribute to the literature and showed the association between social media use disorder and loneliness. These findings can benefit psychologists and public health practitioners in their future prevention and intervention plans.

Big Data, Internet Privacy and the Vulnerabilities of the African Regulatory Landscape

Social media generates massive amount of big data from users, the penetration of these platforms in Africa creates meaningful insights around customer needs and behaviour from the data. This helps to create new businesses that rebalance the technology and wealth gap in the continent. With every gigabytes of data generated brings about exploitation of customer data. Data Privacy becomes a focal point of concern. The global approaches to privacy for the users of social media platforms is still evolving but two jurisdictions have set a standard. The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Californian Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have provisions that are built on sustaining consumer consent and enabling consumers to be forgotten or have their consented data deleted at their own request. More so the exponential growth of the internet in Africa highlights the explosion of big data and there is a need to study its regulatory approaches in relation to the global best practices symbolized by the GDPR and the CCPA. The Paper reviews the African regulatory landscape and its approach to Big Data and possible vulnerable angles that exposes data of Africans on these social media platforms. It is clear that in spite of a continental treaty and a reasonable number of African countries with Data Privacy laws, these laws are in most of the countries either not built on strong legal grounds or lack an independent enforcement mechanism. Therefore the African approach leaves a lot of open issues and there is a need for a continental consensus on the best approach that will push through national legislations crept on a unifying continental model. Keywords : Big Data, Privacy, Regulatory, Social Media, Data analytics, Guidelines, rights DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-17-14 Publication date: June 30th 2020

Fear and Hope, Bitter and Sweet: Emotion Sharing of Cancer Community on Twitter

Emotions are non-negligible parts of the experience among the cancer-affected population to be reckoned with. With the increasing usage of social media platforms as venues for emotional disclosure, we ask the question, what and how are the emotions of the cancer community being shared there? Using a deep learning model and social network analysis, we investigated emotions expressed in a large collection of cancer-related tweets. The results showed that joy was the most commonly shared emotion, followed by sadness and fear, with anger, hope, and bittersweet being less shared. In addition, both the gatekeepers and influencers were more likely to post content with positive emotions, while gatekeepers refrained themselves from posting negative emotions to a greater extent. Last, cancer-related tweets with joy, sadness, and hope received more likes, whereas tweets with joy and anger were more retweeted. The implications of the findings are discussed in the context of social media health communities.

Community evaluation in Facebook groups

One of the main points of the Next Generation Internet is to have a user-centric approach where daily behavior and social life of the users are studied and analyzed in order to model networks and services. Indeed, social life represents the general overview of the behaviour of people, because it can provide information about hobby, relationships, but also similarity, etc. Today, the main channels to study the behaviour of people are Social Media. A great trend in current Social Media platforms is to offer the opportunity to establish and join groups of people, which represents one of the main characteristics of offline social network, where people are clustering, usually based on their interest (work, family, etc.). Despite human behaviour in current Online Social Media have been studied in depth, characteristics of online content-based social groups are still unknown. In this paper, we investigate whether communities can be recognized also in groups defined by users of Social Media platforms and we study how these communities evolve over time. For this purpose, we exploited a real Facebook dataset which consists of 18 Facebook groups of different categories and 3 different community detection algorithms. Our results provide important insights about the behaviour of users in the context of social groups and reveal that the majority of the groups present interactions-based communities, and in particular there is one massive core community which attracts other users and communities.

CONSUMERS’ CLASSIFICATION BASED ON THEIR BEHAVIOR IN THE SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS OF FASHION COMPANIES

Nowadays, consumers focus and rely on SNSs, which are thriving, to get information, recommendations from other users for products and services, and also to interact with companies and organizations. This behaviour is also common for consumers and brands of the fashion industry, as technology and marketing applications are evolving in a new digital environment. In this paper, we are investigating consumers' relationships with Social Media and the way they could be classified, based on their interaction with the SNSs of fashion companies and brands, examining a sample of 327 consumers. Participants in the survey completed a questionnaire concerning the patterns of Social Media platforms usage and their experience. Afterward, Cluster Analysis was used to analyze and classify patterns of usage and consumers, regarding the SNSs’ pages of fashion brands and companies. Our results showed that consumers are classified into four clusters namely: Active Users, Opinion Leaders, Entertainment Seekers, Basic Level- Entertainment Seekers.

Utilizing Social Media Data for Psychoanalysis to Study Human Personality.

Social media data, for instance from Twitter or Facebook, provide a new type of data that consist of a mixture of text, image and video information. From a scientific point of view, the capabilities of this type of data from such microblogs are not well explored and to date it is largely unknown what principal knowledge can be extracted thereof. In this paper, we present a discussion of the capabilities of data from microblogs for performing a psychoanalysis. This could allow an analysis of the human personality of individual users. Such prospects raises serious concerns regarding the privacy of users of social media platforms.

Potential barriers to the use of social media in the public sector: lessons from Saudi Arabia

Social media platforms have transformed the way the public sectors connects and interacts with their citizens. Indeed, social media offers various benefits to the public sector. However, the use of social media is not free of risk. Risks that might arise due to the use of social media platforms in the public sector include privacy, security, and lack of control over the channel of communication. Because of such risks, the uptake of social media platforms is not as expected and this is more evident in developing countries as Saudi Arabia, which has unique cultural values. Hence, this qualitative research aims to realise the main barriers for the usage of social media platforms in the public sector of Saudi Arabia. Six semi-structured interviews were conducted with the e-government executives and bureaucrats to collect relevant data. Following the TOE framework, this research organises these factors into three categories: environmental, organisational and technological.

Analysis of Part of Speech Tags in Language Identification of Code Mixed Text

Language identification is the detection of the language of text in which it is written. The problem becomes challenging when the writer does not use the indigenous script of a language. Generally, this kind of text is generated by social media which is a mixture of English with the native language(s) of the writer. The users of social media platforms that belong to India write in code mixed Hindi English language. In this work, we study the word level language identification as a classification problem to identify the language of a word written in Roman script. We employ POS tags in a transliteration based approach to prepare the Hindi English code mixed corpus. We evaluate the corpus over itself and observe that notable results are obtained.

The influencing role of social media in the consumer’s hotel decision-making process

Purpose This study aims to evaluate the role of social media on the hotel decision-making process of consumers during the evaluation stage of searching, identifying the alternatives and selecting a hotel in India. It will help the stakeholders in the hotel industry of India to make the social media platform more efficient for consumers by providing inputs on the factors consumers consider while making online hotel purchase. Design/methodology/approach This study involves an exploratory qualitative approach which includes 32 face-to-face, semi-structured, in-depth individual interviews with the social media platform users. The selection of interviewees for this study has been done on the basis of a non-random purposive sampling approach. Findings The findings reveal that social media plays an important role in affecting the way consumers search, decide and book hotels. It also suggests that social media helps consumers in collecting information about products and services, assessing alternatives and making their choices. It confirms that while negative facets exist, the positive benefits outweigh the negative aspects of using social media when selecting a hotel. The results also reveal the impact of circumstantial influence related to social media on hotel selection, on the basis of content source and the level of trust and accuracy in the content. Practical implications This study has some strategic implications for hospitality marketing and management related to a better understanding of the influence of social media on the hotel customer decision-making process. The study shows that a variety of social media with associated content sources and levels add to the complexity of hotel-related information search and decision behaviour. Originality/value The study makes a contribution by addressing the existing gaps and bridging the arena of consumer behaviour and social media literature in a hotel context and sheds light on how consumer decisions while selecting a hotel are influenced through social media. The core contribution is the generation of factors through in-depth interviews which are based on real-life scenarios relating to the influence of social media on hotel decision-making.

Emotional Text Mining: Customer profiling in brand management

The widespread use of the Internet and the constant increase in users of social media platforms has made a large amount of textual data available. This represents a valuable source of information about the changes in people’s opinions and feelings. This paper presents the application of Emotional Text Mining (ETM) in the field of brand management. ETM is an unsupervised procedure aiming to profile social media users. It is based on a bottom-up approach to classify unstructured data for the identification of social media users’ representations and sentiments about a topic. It is a fast and simple procedure to extract meaningful information from a large collection of texts. As customer profiling is relevant for brand management, we illustrate a business application of ETM on Twitter messages concerning a well-known sportswear brand in order to show the potential of this procedure, highlighting the characteristics of Twitter user communities in terms of product preferences, representations, and sentiments.

The Indecency of the Communications Decency Act § 230: Unjust Immunity for Monstrous Social Media Platforms

The line between First Amendment protection and the innovation of social media platforms is hazy at best. Not only do these platforms increasingly encompass the lives of many individuals, but they provide incredible new opportunities to interact from near and far, through sharing photographs, videos, and memories. The Internet provides countless outlets that are available at the tip of users’ fingers: thriving forums to communicate nearly whenever and wherever desired. Users effortlessly interact on these platforms and are consistently exposed to numerous forms of speech, including messages through posts, chat room discussions, videos, polls, and shared statements. From 2010 to 2017, the number of social media users worldwide has increased from 0.97 billion to 2.46 billion, respectively.1 These numbers are expected to grow as high as 3.02 billion in the year 2021.2 Undoubtedly, an unbelievably large number of individuals are exposed daily to these leading-edge speech forums—many of whom are unaware of the inadequacy of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (“Section 230”).3 This Article will address its history of creation and past case law, and provide a thorough analysis of its need to be revised. Moreover, this Article will specifically speak to the manner in which it should be revised in order to ensure protection to users of social media platforms who encounter situations in which they seek legal remedies for the need to remove unlawful material.

Smart Monitoring and Controlling of Government Policies Using Social Media and Cloud Computing

The governments, nowadays, throughout the world are increasingly becoming dependent on public opinion regarding the framing and implementation of certain policies for the welfare of the general public. The role of social media is vital to this emerging trend. Traditionally, lack of public participation in various policy making decision used to be a major cause of concern particularly when formulating and evaluating such policies. However, the exponential rise in usage of social media platforms by general public has given the government a wider insight to overcome this long pending dilemma. Cloud-based e-governance is currently being realized due to IT infrastructure availability along with mindset changes of government advisors towards realizing the various policies in a best possible manner. This paper presents a pragmatic approach that combines the capabilities of both cloud computing and social media analytics towards efficient monitoring and controlling of governmental policies through public involvement. The proposed system has provided us some encouraging results, when tested for Goods and Services Tax (GST) implementation by Indian government and established that it can be successfully implemented for efficient policy making and implementation.

THE POSSIBLE RISKS OF USING FACEBOOK IN CORPORATE COMMUNICATION

Corporate reputation is the value that brands give the most importance as it forms the perception of their stakeholders towards the brands, enables the brands to be separated from their rivals and to be respected. Therefore, brands try to shape the perception of their stakeholders in a positive way with the messages that they send through the traditional media continually. However, with the common usage of social media today, brands have to manage their corporate reputation on the online platforms, as well. Nevertheless, the usage of social media platforms possess some possible risks because social media has given the control to the consumers who can easily create user generated content in these platforms. Discontent consumers can express their negative experiences to brands directly on online communities such as Facebook brand fan pages and can prepare a basis for the outburst of a crisis with the support that they gain from other consumers. Therefore, brands should be prepared in advance for crisis scenarios and should maintain an effective complaint management on their Facebook brand fan pages. This paper aims to discuss what makes consumers powerful on social media and the possible risks that brands can come across on social media. Moreover, it examines how complaint management should be handled on Facebook to prevent the emergence of an online crisis. This paper will contribute to the literature of crisis communication from the aspect of social media.

Latino entrepreneurs and social media adoption: personal and business social network platforms

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine both the Latino/Hispanic entrepreneurs’ social media adoption (SMA) for business purposes and the influence of culture on personal versus business social network platform (SNP) selection.Design/methodology/approachThe Technology Acceptance Model’s (TAM) factors of perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEU) as drivers of Latino/Hispanic entrepreneurs’ social network platform selection are examined as well as the effect of SMA on revenue. Data was collected from 633 small business owners across the United States via an online survey administered in English and Spanish.FindingsResults indicate that Latino/Hispanic business owners use personal SNP more than business SNP for business purposes. PU and PEU were not found to predict personal SNP for Latino/Hispanic entrepreneurs. However, for Non-Latino/Hispanics, PU was significant while PEU was marginally significant. Findings for PU and PEU as predictors of business SNP indicate similar results for both Latino/Hispanic and non-Latino/Hispanic entrepreneurs, where only PEU was significant. Finally, there was no relationship between either business or personal SNP and revenue for either Latino/Hispanic or non-Latino/Hispanic entrepreneurs.Practical implicationsThis research provides more insight into Latino/Hispanic entrepreneurs’ self-directed engagement in personal SNP (Facebook) and business SNP (LinkedIn) for business purposes and invites future research in this population to further examine cultural influence and business performance. The findings support the need for Latino/Hispanic entrepreneurs’ strengthening their competency in social media usage to remain competitive, as doing so will enhance their capability for building customer relationships, brand development, and equity financing.Originality/valueThis investigation 1) examines SMA’s role in Latino/Hispanic small and medium enterprises (SMEs); 2) distinguishes between personal and business social network platforms; 3) investigates TAM’s relevance for Latino/Hispanic entrepreneurs’ use of social media for business; and 4) explores SME social media usage as a predictor of revenue. We seek to provide practitioners with a greater understanding of how they may influence business success and sustainability through better competency development and usage of social media platforms.

Benefits of Social Media Platform in Healthcare

The existence of technology such as social media platforms have led individuals and health experts to use it as a supplementary tool. Providing healthcare purposes through social media platforms can facilitate and encourage individuals to gather information as well as acquire social support. Integrating social media platforms into healthcare context is a developing area of behavioral research. It is also found that there is a limited number of studies that reported the benefit acquire from the utilization of social media platforms in healthcare context. Thus, this study reported several benefits that individuals can acquire from the usage of social media platforms for healthcare context.

Social media and Higher Education: FOMO (fear of missing out) or does digitally enabled learning have a place in Law Schools?

Recently embraced by the legal profession to make justice more accessible, social media (SM) is fast becoming the primary tool of communication for the courts. In Australia today The Supreme Court of Victoria uses SM to share judgments, media releases, publications, speeches and other information. On the County Court of Victoria home page one can read the Court's Twitter feed. These innovations have led to the expectations for Australian law schools to adopt 21st century technology, and enhance student engagement in the classroom. While there are studies which have investigated the use of SM as an educational tool in general, research specifically addressing its application to Law curricula is scant. In this article we propose that introducing SM into curricula will create learning opportunities to develop the awareness of responsible usage of SM platforms, thereby ensuring successful communication outcomes for Law graduates. We discuss the challenge of online scholarly/academic identity, and also the social capital benefits. A brief account of SM and the legal industry is presented next. Because of the impact of policy imperatives, VU Blended Learning Strategy and Graduate Capabilities for 21st century have been included. Examples of SM applications in the Australian Law classroom, including the use of the meme, an image with a text phrase that is distributed via SM, are discussed. The complex and contested nature of SM, leads the authors conclude that it is possible to successfully implement digitally enabled learning in the Australian Law classroom, but not without certain pedagogical caveats.

YouTube Generated Video Clips as Qualitative Research Data: One Researcher’s Reflections on the Process

The ever-developing arena of social media blurs lines separating public and private spheres. Voluntary usage of social media platforms transforms users’ personal and sometimes private imaginings into publicly accessible artifacts. The entanglement of these two domains demands society’s consideration as policy makers, employers, and qualitative inquirers contend with making meaning of messages initiated within the social media sphere in a world extending beyond it. In this article, I reflect on interplay with a subset of data from my dissertation featuring transcripts pulled from YouTube videos posted by self-identified biracial individuals. As I attempted to instill dialogic properties into what could have been unidirectional interactions, I confronted several challenges. I managed pressures of simultaneous allegiances to my research goals and to the integrities of my informants who were not aware that they were informing me. This article provides insight into navigating these tensions, which are necessary and, to date, too scarcely available.