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Keep Your Friends Close and Your Partners in Crime Closer...

To understand why people, succeed or fail, look at their circle of friends. Like it or not, people’s fates are closely connected to their human networks. While human networks can be beneficial – a friend can be a referral to a lucrative new job, for example – there can be negative effects as well: What happens when someone doesn’t know influential people? A limited human network, Jackson said, can hinder opportunities with deleterious effects on society. It helps explain why social immobility and inequality exist today.

The deep connections that people nurture underlie important political and economic establishments and they have become so intertwined, that one risky move can literally bring the world’s economy to its knees and spread financial distress across the network. For example, the 2008 recession was brought about by a group of tight nit individuals who decided to move their money to the wrong places and at the wrong time, thus tailspin the world’s economy.

Another way that social media can negatively impact homophily is through the job market. Take the importance of networks in employment, for example. In almost all professions, a high percentage of jobs are found via referrals. A person’s employment becomes heavily dependent upon a circle of friends and connections for help in accessing the know-how and opportunities to get good jobs. A person’s fate is closely connected to that of friends.

Combined with homophily, the general tendency of people to interact with others who are similar to themselves, this can lead to large and persistent differences in employment across groups, especially by ethnicity and gender. A group that is poorly employed ends up offering few opportunities to its members, as none of them have friends who are well-employed or experienced in navigating the labor market. In turn, this discourages investment in education and participation in the workforce.  The more homophilic a society is, the greater the resulting inequality and lack of social mobility can be. The benefits of technological advances and globalization have been enormous. In 1980 over 40 percent of the world’s population lived below the poverty line, while now less than 10 percent do. Poverty is far from being erased, and that line is pretty low, but the progress is actually quite amazing. Technological advances and increased connectivity have also had several side effects. One is that the externalizes in networks, like the financial networks mentioned above, can move further and faster than ever before. This does not necessarily mean that the network is “too connected’’ but that we have to use our network knowledge to better regulate the extreme connectivity and resulting externalizations. The same is true of diseases and the consequences of pockets of unvaccinated people. Along with this is another trend that is reshaping our networks. We have better technologies to find and connect with other people who are similar and think similarly to ourselves. This comes with benefits, as it can be great to connect with someone with common interests and who can offer advice and empathy; but it also comes with the costs of creating echo chambers and increasing homophily. It may not be that technology is making our networks too connected, but instead that it is making our networks too biased

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It all started with a Rabbit and a Hole...

Have you ever wondered how you got into that rabbit hole while watching a YouTube video? You click on one video that catches your eye then the next thing you know you are deep, deep, deep…into the next universe of deep into the subject material and it’s now been over a week since anyone has seen you last. There’s a reason for that and it’s meant for you to get hooked and keep watching content in binge-worthy fashion. It’s called the algorithmic recommendation. What it does, is that it takes your search and watch history and mines that information and suggests content based on that history, thus keeping you watching till the cows come home (Kaiser & Rauchfleisch, 2020). Literally, there are videos of cows coming home.

They say, “Birds of a feather get recommended together”, and it’s this algorithmic homophily that is not only keeping users hooked, but is also building communities based on content (Kaiser & Rauchfleisch, 2020). This is not necessarily a bad thing in theory. It has helped creators spread content at an exponential rate to users and keep users from having to search and dig for relative content by suggesting exactly what you are looking for, or in some cases content you never knew you wanted, one click away. The communities that have been made from the content are usually like-minded individuals and find solace in being able to share common goals, ideals, and new ideas for content (Kaiser & Rauchfleisch, 2020). However, it is not all sunshine and rainbows. YouTube has been identified as the one social media platform that might be the most prone to negative effects due to algorithmic recommendations (Kaiser & Rauchfleisch, 2020). Politics and religion continue to be hotly debated battlegrounds and the rampant use of misinformation has only fueled the fire. Joining a community is great and can help people in more ways now than in previous generations, but it is a double-edged sword and can be used to further divide people to the point of no return.   

References

Kaiser, J., & Rauchfleisch, A. (2020). Birds of a feather get recommended together: Algorithmic homophily in YouTube’s channel recommendations in the united states and germany. Social Media Society, 6(4), 2056305120969914.

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Psychology Engagement Giveaway!

Capturing Attention in Social Media

Capturing the attention of social media users means keeping them constantly looking, constantly scrolling, and keeping them engaged, and looking forward to what is to come. Keeping users engaged is especially important if you are using social media to market, sell, or advertise your business.

Many challenges are facing both new and more established platforms. Many brands want more engagement on their social media posts, but some are stuck in their old ways or are stuck in ruts and cannot think of new progressive strategies. Three ways that some social media platforms are gaining ground are knowing their audience, understanding the components of an engaging post, and more importantly, understanding your platform.

Maintaining Engagement in Social Media

Social media engagement is a term for people’s interactions with social media platforms and reflects and measures how much a certain demographic or audience interacts with the content on a certain platform. These interactions can be measured by likes, comments, shares, etc.

Discuss at least three strategies that have been shown to be effective. Knowing your audience and how to find and use engagement metrics is a sound way of increasing your social media engagement. After you have found some tools to measure metrics such as traffic, media shares, and comments, setting healthy and obtainable goals is essential to keeping up in today’s social media market. Setting goals is futile however without knowing your audience demographic. Your brand is making content for your audience, so always keep them in mind, from deciding what content to create to determine the best times to post on social media. One of the fastest ways to get engagement with your account is to host a giveaway. People love to get free things, and if you make it an engagement-focused giveaway, it can help you hit your goals. For example, many of these contests ask followers to like, comment, tag a friend and/or follow for entry.