With Orkut having shut down few weeks back, I thought it is the right time for me to compile my thoughts from how it all started to where I am today w.r.t my social media journey.
To me, internet once upon a time was just yahoo mail and yahoo messenger. Sending smileys to people who were online in messenger and reading interesting emails forwarded by family members and spammers was all I had to do. But who even wanted to go online then? We had games like Road rash and Claw for which 95% of parents bought us PC and we never got bored.
When I was in my 11th I went to my friend's place and saw him using a colorful website. I asked him what he was doing and he said "Idhu Orkut da mama. Friend oda scraping da." . I was thinking madayan adhan chatting ku Yahoo messenger aay irukae apram enna? and didn't bother much. After going home I anyways signed up for Orkut just to see what it was about.
The home page showed "you have 0 friends 0% cool 0% sexy 0% trustworthy, invite your friends, etc." Then I kinda knew that this was unlike yahoo messenger (which was uni dimensional) and had something more to it. Next day when I asked people in my class if they were there in Orkut, they all in turn asked me Hey Orkut vantiya? Request kudra and explained me briefly about the communities and other features of Orkut. I realized that I was a late comer.
One day as usual when I logged into Orkut, I found something written about me which was blocking the entire home page.. The stuff was awesome to read. A big paragraph of what the other person thinks about you; the Testimonial.
After few months of acclimatizing myself to Orkut I felt it
Beyond a point Orkut didn't innovate much and so the community reached a saturation point with people getting busier with college admissions and the interest in me also quickly faded. At the same time my friends started asking, hey Facebook sentiya da? Orkuta vida gethu da. Va Vaa.. Na invite tharaen.
Again the same yahoo messenger logic was running in my mind. Orkuta vida epdi da getha iruka mudiyum? Idhula enna illa adhula iruku? But anyways I joined. Facebook was a new world altogether. Nothing by the word "community", no fan counts, no testimonials in homepage, and on top of that was very confusing to use at that time.We ended up replying on our own wall like in Orkut scrapbook and get embarrassed. So I got instant dislike towards it. Still I took this as an assignment to learn about Facebook because I didn't have any other hobbies at that time apart from collecting coins.
Facebook started making necessary changes to make the medium more easy to understand. The LIKE button was one feature which immediately hogged my attention and people were also behind it. After having enough understanding on how Facebook works, I first started importing all the jokes from my community in Orkut in an attempt to regain people here. The tough part was our status updates those days were limited to 1000 characters only. So I had to break sentences, sometimes edit line by line to successfully post them without compromising on the joke. I also shared the jokes to pages such as Daily Humor on a constant basis to gain attention of wide range of people.
Apart from that, I also concentrated on what people liked in general such as sports updates, television serials, programs, childhood memories, short films, sharing memes that are funny etc etc etc. In short I wanted to spread happiness however possible. After posting/sharing all these only to my friends circle and getting positive feedback consistently, I enabled my profile to public and pretty much continued doing the same. Slowly the number of viewers who were able to relate to my posts kept increasing and I reached a point where I could no longer share whatever I wanted. People started having opinions about me based on whatever I posted. Therefore these days as much as possible I try to avoid controversial posts and post whatever is safe and enjoyable by the majority. That's simply how I reached where I am today. No hassles, no special efforts no nothing. Just one among you guys.
Here I would like to mention about one thing which really made my profile's viewership increase rapidly. After achieving quite a bit of followers I felt that the potential for memes to reach more people was imminent. The concept of a picture is worth 1000 words. So I started sharing memes regularly and ensured that the work of friends and people around me get recognized. It is this simple step of sharing others creation with credits that made both myself and many people around me reach a wider audience. I would also like to clarify to people that I do not create memes and only share others work with proper credits. If a meme lies like an anaadha kozhandhai, I share it anyways without courtesy so that the person who created it ends up notifying me after which I can give him the credits. This is pretty much what I have done in Facebook.
In short Facebook
After my first two years into Facebook, I also simultaneously created a Twitter handle to see what it can offer. Twitter is probably the most difficult medium to shine for someone. Unless and until are great in blogging or a celebrity or have people you know who are already there in twitter who could tell his/her followers about you, it pretty much becomes like "Hello Yaaranu irukeengla? romba romba amaidhya irukudhae" . If you do not concentrate much about followers, then twitter is a great place to know whats happening around the world in fraction of a second.
With direct updates from celebrities and news agencies themselves in the form of headlines every minute along with the link to news articile, you can break the news in Facebook as soon as u see in twitter. So Twitter and Facebook can complement each other. I got a lot of help from seasoned tweeters like @raghuthaatha, @puneersoda, @whattekarvaad and @adrasakka initially to get that boost. After getting decent amount of followers I started sharing whatever I had posted in Facebook on to twitter. But it didn't work as people in twitter were already updated with old jokes. Then I started tweeting one liners every now and then but didn't end up getting even 1% of feedback what I get in Facebook. Rarely a tweet or two gets attention like the one which came in IPL 2013 CSK vs RR match and with that moment I try to catch up for all the lost efforts by advertising (keeping cover pictures) and all those stuffs.
Also the use of hashtags became wide spread in twitter. With a particular hashtag you can segregate the views of people specifically to the news and end up getting wide range of opinions from people. These things can help you learn about general thinking of people and alter your future posts accordingly .
This year, with an unprecedented increase in Facebook subscribers I tried to bring more people from Facebook to twitter there by making a steady progress in twitter as well. The advantage with twitter is that no one can question you with the number of updates you share every day. Unlike Facebook which clogs others news feeds at any time of the day, Twitter presents news feed at that time. So your posts will be seen by those only who are interested to follow you in Twitter. I still have lots to learn in twitter and how to effectively use the medium.
Twitter in short
Finally Quora. Though I am not that active in here, I understand that it gives us all the answers for questions we need. Something like a Wikipedia but the answers we get are mostly from experts in that particular field. For instance if you want to know how NASA sent a particular satellite to space, you might be having answers from astronauts and scientists working in NASA. So Quora, Facebook and Twitter can be a very productive tool for someone to improve their quality of using internet.
My journey so far has been a very interesting one with new things to learn every day. The number of people from different age groups who have written back to me saying how my posts make them happy after a tiring day at office or from graduate students and workers away from home who miss their family really touches me and encourages me to keep posting.
With the world moving very fast, I have always realized that people around us are always stressful with something or the other and are rarely happy. So posting humorous or positive stuffs in social media has always been my way of making people around me comfortable and happy :) At times certain posts can backfire as I'm also a human and tend to make mistakes here and there. But nevertheless this has been an overview of my journey.
Social media is a great place to ensure happiness. So please do so. Thank you all.
To me, internet once upon a time was just yahoo mail and yahoo messenger. Sending smileys to people who were online in messenger and reading interesting emails forwarded by family members and spammers was all I had to do. But who even wanted to go online then? We had games like Road rash and Claw for which 95% of parents bought us PC and we never got bored.
When I was in my 11th I went to my friend's place and saw him using a colorful website. I asked him what he was doing and he said "Idhu Orkut da mama. Friend oda scraping da." . I was thinking madayan adhan chatting ku Yahoo messenger aay irukae apram enna? and didn't bother much. After going home I anyways signed up for Orkut just to see what it was about.
The home page showed "you have 0 friends 0% cool 0% sexy 0% trustworthy, invite your friends, etc." Then I kinda knew that this was unlike yahoo messenger (which was uni dimensional) and had something more to it. Next day when I asked people in my class if they were there in Orkut, they all in turn asked me Hey Orkut vantiya? Request kudra and explained me briefly about the communities and other features of Orkut. I realized that I was a late comer.
One day as usual when I logged into Orkut, I found something written about me which was blocking the entire home page.. The stuff was awesome to read. A big paragraph of what the other person thinks about you; the Testimonial.
After few months of acclimatizing myself to Orkut I felt it
- was a platform where I could write what I thought about friends and vice versa in the form of testimonial.
- could create communities (pages) and gather people with similar interest and discuss interesting topics with them.
- enabled us to know how your friends circle rated you on features such as coolness, etc.
- helped us share photos, videos, links and get comments from people to our scrapbook.
Beyond a point Orkut didn't innovate much and so the community reached a saturation point with people getting busier with college admissions and the interest in me also quickly faded. At the same time my friends started asking, hey Facebook sentiya da? Orkuta vida gethu da. Va Vaa.. Na invite tharaen.
Again the same yahoo messenger logic was running in my mind. Orkuta vida epdi da getha iruka mudiyum? Idhula enna illa adhula iruku? But anyways I joined. Facebook was a new world altogether. Nothing by the word "community", no fan counts, no testimonials in homepage, and on top of that was very confusing to use at that time.We ended up replying on our own wall like in Orkut scrapbook and get embarrassed. So I got instant dislike towards it. Still I took this as an assignment to learn about Facebook because I didn't have any other hobbies at that time apart from collecting coins.
Facebook started making necessary changes to make the medium more easy to understand. The LIKE button was one feature which immediately hogged my attention and people were also behind it. After having enough understanding on how Facebook works, I first started importing all the jokes from my community in Orkut in an attempt to regain people here. The tough part was our status updates those days were limited to 1000 characters only. So I had to break sentences, sometimes edit line by line to successfully post them without compromising on the joke. I also shared the jokes to pages such as Daily Humor on a constant basis to gain attention of wide range of people.
Apart from that, I also concentrated on what people liked in general such as sports updates, television serials, programs, childhood memories, short films, sharing memes that are funny etc etc etc. In short I wanted to spread happiness however possible. After posting/sharing all these only to my friends circle and getting positive feedback consistently, I enabled my profile to public and pretty much continued doing the same. Slowly the number of viewers who were able to relate to my posts kept increasing and I reached a point where I could no longer share whatever I wanted. People started having opinions about me based on whatever I posted. Therefore these days as much as possible I try to avoid controversial posts and post whatever is safe and enjoyable by the majority. That's simply how I reached where I am today. No hassles, no special efforts no nothing. Just one among you guys.
Here I would like to mention about one thing which really made my profile's viewership increase rapidly. After achieving quite a bit of followers I felt that the potential for memes to reach more people was imminent. The concept of a picture is worth 1000 words. So I started sharing memes regularly and ensured that the work of friends and people around me get recognized. It is this simple step of sharing others creation with credits that made both myself and many people around me reach a wider audience. I would also like to clarify to people that I do not create memes and only share others work with proper credits. If a meme lies like an anaadha kozhandhai, I share it anyways without courtesy so that the person who created it ends up notifying me after which I can give him the credits. This is pretty much what I have done in Facebook.
In short Facebook
- is a powerful tool where anyone can put forth their view points to mass audience
- a great medium for connecting with friends whom you have met at various stages of your life and also random people with similar likes
- best source to spread happiness without actually putting any efforts.
- is as powerful as print media and the responsibility for each and everyone is greater than what we think we have.
After my first two years into Facebook, I also simultaneously created a Twitter handle to see what it can offer. Twitter is probably the most difficult medium to shine for someone. Unless and until are great in blogging or a celebrity or have people you know who are already there in twitter who could tell his/her followers about you, it pretty much becomes like "Hello Yaaranu irukeengla? romba romba amaidhya irukudhae" . If you do not concentrate much about followers, then twitter is a great place to know whats happening around the world in fraction of a second.
With direct updates from celebrities and news agencies themselves in the form of headlines every minute along with the link to news articile, you can break the news in Facebook as soon as u see in twitter. So Twitter and Facebook can complement each other. I got a lot of help from seasoned tweeters like @raghuthaatha, @puneersoda, @whattekarvaad and @adrasakka initially to get that boost. After getting decent amount of followers I started sharing whatever I had posted in Facebook on to twitter. But it didn't work as people in twitter were already updated with old jokes. Then I started tweeting one liners every now and then but didn't end up getting even 1% of feedback what I get in Facebook. Rarely a tweet or two gets attention like the one which came in IPL 2013 CSK vs RR match and with that moment I try to catch up for all the lost efforts by advertising (keeping cover pictures) and all those stuffs.
Also the use of hashtags became wide spread in twitter. With a particular hashtag you can segregate the views of people specifically to the news and end up getting wide range of opinions from people. These things can help you learn about general thinking of people and alter your future posts accordingly .
This year, with an unprecedented increase in Facebook subscribers I tried to bring more people from Facebook to twitter there by making a steady progress in twitter as well. The advantage with twitter is that no one can question you with the number of updates you share every day. Unlike Facebook which clogs others news feeds at any time of the day, Twitter presents news feed at that time. So your posts will be seen by those only who are interested to follow you in Twitter. I still have lots to learn in twitter and how to effectively use the medium.
Twitter in short
- Gives us breaking news of pretty much everything in the world right from people and news channels whom you want to follow be it celebrities to local channel lendhu national channel varaikum.. National channel lendhu international channel varaikum.
- a great medium to link your blog or website and get a wider reach than you get in Facebook (provided you have basic followers).
- gets us more constructive feedback and criticisms from people.
- helps us develop the habit of writing anything short and sweet
Finally Quora. Though I am not that active in here, I understand that it gives us all the answers for questions we need. Something like a Wikipedia but the answers we get are mostly from experts in that particular field. For instance if you want to know how NASA sent a particular satellite to space, you might be having answers from astronauts and scientists working in NASA. So Quora, Facebook and Twitter can be a very productive tool for someone to improve their quality of using internet.
My journey so far has been a very interesting one with new things to learn every day. The number of people from different age groups who have written back to me saying how my posts make them happy after a tiring day at office or from graduate students and workers away from home who miss their family really touches me and encourages me to keep posting.
With the world moving very fast, I have always realized that people around us are always stressful with something or the other and are rarely happy. So posting humorous or positive stuffs in social media has always been my way of making people around me comfortable and happy :) At times certain posts can backfire as I'm also a human and tend to make mistakes here and there. But nevertheless this has been an overview of my journey.
Social media is a great place to ensure happiness. So please do so. Thank you all.
