P1: Factsheet

Facebook

Purpose
Facebook was founded in 2004 with a mission to give people the power to share and make the world more openly connected. People use Facebook to stay connected with their friends and family, to discover what is going on in the world and also to share and express what matters to them. People share information in form of status updates, photos and videos, and private messaging. Users are able to comment, like, and react to their friends status updates.

Content
The content of Facebook varies for each user. As well as seeing things their friends has shared, users are able to like pages of products, celebrities, tv shows etc to see updates on them. Using information from what people have liked, Facebook is able to recommend other pages, display adverts and news stories that might appeal to the user.

Target user
Facebook was initially designed for college students in America, however over the past 12 years it has become one of the biggest social platform used worldwide by all ages. Approximately 66% of 15-34 years olds have a Facebook account, while 30% of people older than this use the site. 

Source of Revenue
Facebook earns most of its revenue through advertisements that get displayed on the users timeline. These ads are often tailored to the persons interests based on data that the site has collected on them through link clicks and pages they've like. On the app version of Facebook, these ads appear while the user is scrolling meaning they are morning difficult to ignore.

Legal and Ethical Issues
Due to anybody over 14 being allowed to join Facebook its difficult to control what is posted all the time. If something is posted that somebody may find offensive you can report a post for various reasons and Facebook will take action required. There was some controversy over the site taking down an image that a woman put up of her breastfeeding her new born child for displaying nudity. This caused problems as many people disputed that there was any nudity displayed. Cases like this are common where some people will find something offensive that others may not and it is difficult for Facebook to please everyone.  


Instagram

Purpose
Instagram is an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them on a variety of social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr. Users can edit their images in the app using a range of basic tools and filters.

Content
Users follow accounts according to what they want to see on their feed. Alternatively to this, Instagram has a hashtag feature which allows users to tag words that are relevant to their image, if you click on a certain tag it will take you to a page with a feed of pictures that have also been tagged which allows users to find more accounts to follow and also get their feed seen by more people.

Target User
Instagram is aimed towards a younger generation with over 90% of their users being under 35 years old. I think this is mainly because it allows you to connect with strangers and share moments in your life whereas Facebook lets people connect to others they already know which would appeal more to the older generation. Also Instagram is designed to mainly be used on a smartphone which appeals more to a younger generation.

Source of Revenue
Much like most social media sites, Instagram uses adverts to create revenue. Large companies will pay to have their ad shown on the app and often users with a large following will be sponsored to promote a certain product on their feed. Instagram have recently partnered with an app called Boomerang which essentially allows users to make gifs to post, whenever someone post one of these gifs, a note under their post will appear telling others the apps name.

Legal and Ethical Issues
Again due to anybody being allowed to sign up to Instagram it is hard to control any inappropriate posts. The app has a set of rules that explain what sort of content is not allowed to be posted and users are able to report and images that they think shouldn't be on there. As well as reporting single images, people can report entire accounts if they think that the account is upsetting people or in some cases pretending to be somebody else by using their pictures.


Twitter

Purpose
Twitter, one of the most popular social networking services in the world, is a micro blogging platform, which allows registered users to post, and send to other registered users, short messages. These short messages, limited to 140 characters, are called tweets.

Content
Twitter allows you to post tweets, pictures, gifs, videos and share vines directly from the vine app, you can like or re-tweet something that somebody else has posted so it will appear on your profile feed.. Users will follow accounts of their favourite celebrities etc. Twitter also has a hashtag feature that allows you to see all the tweets that have been tagged with a certain word or phrase. The most used tags will appear as 'trending' and this allows users to discuss relevant topics with others that they might not follow otherwise.

Target User
Twitter appeals to many people as they can voice their opinion and discuss with others of the same interest. It would be assumed that its mains demographic is young people however only 33% of 13-17 year olds use Twitter. Many people of the older generation will use it to follow new account, politicians etc as it is extremely easy to tailor what you see on your timeline.

Source of Revenue
Much like Instagram, Twitter will place ad's on people timelines, these will often be in the form of a tweet from a certain company and will be labelled as a 'promoted tweet' which lets users know when they are being advertised to. Accounts with a large following will be paid to promote a product in their tweets and they will often let people know that they are being paid to tweet about a product by ending a tweet with '#ad'