Let Facebook Become a Real Friend

Let Facebook Become A Real Friend

"Social network"-a familiar clause -which is used to regard the virtual community on the Internet, emerged as a common type of communication, entertainment for almost young generations and become the lives of many individuals. Providing many kinds of social group together in one place and making them interact is really a great thing.

One of those popular social networks is Facebook, which is considered as the world's biggest social site. The founder of Facebook-Mark Zuckerberg-launched his product on the 4th of February 2004 and witnessed a remarkable rise in the number of registered member and page views each day. Existing research shows that young people are motivated to join this site to make friends, to keep in touch with the old ones who they have not seen for many years or live in another region of the Earth, to strengthen ties with new acquaintances (Acquisti, and Gross, as cited in Valenzuela, Park, and Kee, 2006, p. 3). Besides, Facebook also allow them to exchange news and discuss issues, both public and private. However, this social network site is not entirely free from drawbacks. If one is not a Facebook user, he/she can easily realize the problems it can cause.

In this paper, the authors examine some benefits and problems that Facebook provides to people. More importantly, the paper also strengthen the thesis and argument by highlighting the most negative effect-Losing real life and introduce some ways to encourage people to take action in community, in order to make Facebook become a real friend of each people. In doing so, the paper aims to gain a perception of turning the meaningless actions on Facebook into the useful activities.

The Facebook Statistics

The World Is Obsessed With Facebook Through Numbers

On October 4, 2012, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook hit over one billion users. With the figures from the chart (Facebook: Data reflects 'monthly active users', 2012), it can be seen that Facebook is now used by 1 in every 7 people on earth, with over 50% who log in every day (Smith, Segall and Cowley, 2012).

In 2004, Mark Zukerberg and co-founders launched Facebook from their Harvard room, and open the new concept about Social network to many universities in The United States such as Yale, Stanford, Colombia. At the end of that year, Facebook reached over 1 million users that was the starting point for the new project of the world when the group application was added. In the period from 2005 to 2009, Facebook changed the name The Facebook to Facebook and added to international schools and work places with the cooperation with Microsoft, Facebook also expanded the advertising deal to cover international market, and two features of Chat and Like, Facebook got more than 250 million users. Until now, Facebook hits over 1 billion users and Facebook becomes the top social network in the world thanks to the development of applications on Facebook. According to Austin (2012), "if Facebook were a country, it would be the third-largest nation" according to population after China and India (para. 2).

Over 600 million people access Facebook via their mobile phone. 48% of amount of young people said they now get their news through Facebook. Meanwhile, in just 20 minutes on Facebook over 1 million links are shared, 2 million friend requests are accepted and almost 3 million messages are sent. Interestingly, 48% of 18-34 year olds checks Facebook when they wake up, with 28% of its doing so before even getting out of bed. (Hepburn, 2011, Facebook Statistics Stats and Facts For 2011, para. 3).

The advantages of using Facebook

Advantages of Facebook in business

Facebook has been obviously used as a business and marketing tool in many different ways, for instance, advertising, shopping online. Many marketers began to use Facebook as a component in their marketing strategies and campaigns to achieve their targets and potential customers.

Facebook also offers businesses with a bright opportunity to reach out directly to their customers through marketing on a webpage with one billion users log in per day. Not only big brands but also small local business can benefit a lot from an online presence on Facebook, such as Vinamilk and Kinh Do Bakery. Geron (2012) said that Facebook reported the revenue of $3.71 billion in 2011, an increase by 88% from the total $1.97 billion reported from 2010 (para. 4). According to Spears (2012), Facebook becomes the world's most popular social-networking site, is sought as much as $11.8 billion in its Initial Public Offering (IPO), the largest record for an Internet company (para. 1).

Advantages of Facebook in education

Facebook provides the instructors with opportunities and structures which students can help and support others by building their courses atop the community already established by the students themselves. Hamann and Wilson (as cited in Muñoz, C. L., and Towner, T., 2011) found that students who participated in a web-enhanced class outperformed those students in a traditional lecture format and this suggests engage students in a manner unique from the traditional class lecture.

While Facebook is not used for direct teaching, it is on the way to become more than an informal education network between students to contact their classmates about questions related to class assignments or examinations, cooperate on group projects. Madge, Meek, Wellens and Hooley (2009) said that 46% students used Facebook to discuss academic work informally with other students on a daily or weekly basis; 22% said they did on a monthly basis (p. 148).

Advantages of Facebok in society

When using Facebook, connection becomes closer. A person can connect to friends and keep in touch with people who have mutual friends as well in order to broaden the relationship. With useful functions such as sharing images, hobbies, experiences, opinions, Facebook will help the users who lost information from their friends for a long time have a chance to reconnect.

Moreover, it is so economic to use online social network for both personal and business usages because most of them are usually free of charge. In a social network site, one could figure out potential customers and target markets with just a few clicks with some simple keywords, make people familiar with effective advertisements and attractive promotion campaigns.

It is also very convenient that people can listen to music, play game, chat at the same time with the same website to relax and relieve their stress.

Disadvantages