A day In The Life Of A Social Networker

Ever wondered what so many people do online for hours on social networking sites? Or what gets your teen hooked on to these websites? It is a common musing of adults and the minority of people not using online social networking site – What is there in it to be hooked on daily? Let us find out.

Networking sites allows you to build your circle of friends by first inviting your friends to join your network on the site. Each friend then repeats this process thereby growing your network. Networking sites also have services that allow a user to introduce two other users. A website may have different ways of linking people together in a network. Bebo is an online network that allows users to network through their schools and colleges.

So what does an average user do online on these websites on a daily basis? Let us look at the most common day to day activities from the signing up stage and why they do it.

Creating And Modifying Profiles

A profile is a representation of the user and other users can read other profiles to get information on a user. Networking sites offer a variety of ways to customize your profile with glitter text, changing the color of the page and the style of the text and so on. Webfetti is a tool gaining popularity in this regards. Teens work on making this page look hip and cool so as to be considered cool among their peers.

Adding Friends And Linking To Friends Profiles

On an average day users tend to link to their friend’s profiles through photos and common links. Users may tag their friends on the photos on their page and place links to websites on the profile page of the users on their friend list. This is used to stay connected to the happenings in each others everyday lives.

Photo Sharing

Teens upload and share photos and videos with their friends on the website. This is a way of finding out what they did on events like their birthday, wedding or a picnic. Teens with friends outside their place of residence find this tool very useful for sharing important information with each other

Send Messages

Sending messages to friends is an easy and economical ay of staying in touch or just saying hello. It is less cumbersome than mailing and since they log in anyway on the website it becomes a great way to stay connected than to email. Some sites like Facebook also allow the user to add an action to the message such as a hug or a kiss.

Browse Profiles

Teens tend to spend some time browsing profiles of friends to track any changes in their profiles. Websites such as Facebook and MySpace post regular updates on any changes such as adding of a new photo happening on friends’ profiles. Teens also browse profiles to make new friends or to look for friends that are not on their list.

Apart from this teens add and use applications, music and join communities of their interest on various networking sites. As is evident the whole point of logging on to networking sites is to keep oneself updated on what our friends have been doing, and staying in touch with them and also making new connections.