2.2.5 Virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds
The last two types of social media are virtual game worlds and virtual social world. Virtual social world is more similar to the real life because participants are able to choose own behavior in the virtual world. The virtual social world is presented as a three-dimensional social environment, where all different users are interacting with each other’s. Author of the article also underline that there are no rules that are limiting possible interactions that allows unlimited range of self-representation and real life behaviors. The most popular example of virtual social world is a Second life application that is founded by Linden Research Inc. The application not only reflects a real life but also create a content (for instance, create details of furniture, cosmetics and jewelry) and sell the content using Linden Dollars (the virtual currency traded against the US dollar). Therefore, virtual social worlds propose different opportunities for firms engaged in marketing activities as well as human resources and internal processes management according to Kaplan and Heinlein (2010).
2.3 The most popular social media platforms worldwide and in Finland
2.3.1 The most popular SM platforms worldwide
As the services of social media become more and more popular, there are a lot of social networks where people create business connections, collaborate in projects, communicate with new people/colleagues/friends, share own ideas photos videos, review or choose appropriate product or service, use bookmarks, virtual social gaming. Statistics used in the paragraph were taken from the official statistical portal Statista, where information is already uploaded in 2018. Some of the most popular social networking service are presented below.
The general statistics presented below shows the most popular social media platforms worldwide in January 20018, the variable are ranked in accordance of active users, where the users’ amounts are presented in millions euro. Therefore, in accordance to FIGURE 1, the most famous social network worldwide is Facebook, the number of active users is more than 2.1 billion. The second place is going to YouTube as the number of active users is over 1.5 billion.
The third, fourth, fifth and sixth places are platforms for message exchanges and calls such as
WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and QQ, where number of users is varying between 1.3 billions and 843 million. The next place goes to Instagram and there are more than 800 million active users in January 2018.
FIGURE 1. Most famous social network sites worldwide as of January 2018, ranked by number of active users (in millions). (Statista 2018)
As WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and QQ are services primarily based on message exchange, we are not take them into account. Thus, Facebook, Youtube and Instagram will be considered as the most popular platforms.
2.3.1.1 Facebook
IMAGE 1. Facebook logo (Facebook 2018)
Facebook is a social media and social networking service that is located in USA. The website was launched in February 4, 2014 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard college students.
The clear definition of Facebook was created by Palmer and Koeing-Lewis, where social media means “a site which gives users opportunity to create their own profile with the additional option of displaying their friends’ personalities as well as sharing documents, pictures” (2009).
Moreover, Coulter and Roggeveen, underline in Management Research Review (2012) that “by
publishing own information in Facebook, sharing ideas with others and receiving materials about other peoples’ lives, serves as a result of a form of collaboration that generate new content”. Therefore, the main idea of Facebook is exchange of information, where people can create own profiles with photos and information about yourself, invite own friends, meet new people, change status, leave messages on own and others' walls, upload photos and videos, create various groups (for instance, different communities of interest).
In recent years, Facebook has acquired additional value for society. Thus, Facebook is an advertising tool through which companies promote own product or service: a lot of people have a Facebook account in order to do a business, easily get to the people by spreading messages, creating contacts with consumers and building new connection (Lutze 2010). Therefore, Facebook also serves as a business tool, due to the large amount of people using this service, good quality service or product can success there. For instance, if the service is of high quality, people write review of it on the business’ page, then others can observe and also use the service.
Other opportunities of Facebook advertisements for business are revealed in next paragraph about advertising in social media.
According to the journal of social sciences and Humanities written by Uchechi Cynthia Ohajionu and Soney Mathews (2015) the total amount of worldwide users in 2013 is one billion people. However, at the present time the general statistics shows that there are over two billion monthly active users in Facebook worldwide in the fourth quarter of the 2017 and this number is rapidly growing as in 2008 the number was 100 millions users (Statista 2017).
FIGURE 2. Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 4th quarter 2017 (in millions) (Statista 2018).
Therefore, Facebook serves as one of the most popular social media tool and according to the research tables above there is a high involvement of the people and the number of participants is very high worldwide. Thus, the platform is suitable for business advertisement and has different opportunities for development.