Top 5 Benefits of Social Media for Students | Emertxe (2023)

Introduction:

Social media is a platform where people from all over the world can connect and interact with each other. Social media has gained a lot of momentum in the past few years. As almost everyone have a smartphone with them, it becomes easier for them to use social networking sites. Everyone will have at least one account in any one of the social media websites. Social media plays a key role in everyone’s life. Students are also using social media extensively. While there is a general perception that students end up wasting lot of time in Social media, it can be used for many benefits. Now let’s read the top 5 benefits of social media for students.

Before jumping into benefits of social media, let us try to understand it better. There are different types of social media that exist today :

• Social Networking (Facebook, Linked-In, Google+)
• Micro blogging (Twitter, Tumblr)
• Photo Sharing (Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest)
• Video Sharing (YouTube, Facebook-live, Periscope, Vimeo)

Combining all of them together, social media has gained a lot of importance because of the drastic increase in the number of users. As we can see (ref – statistics below) that there are 2.27 billion active monthly users on Facebook alone, which alone covers about 40% of the world’s population.Thanks to their age group and easy access, various social media sites are accessing them. According to one of the recent report, percentage of students who use each platform goes as follows:

• Facebook – 96%

• YouTube – 84%

• Blogs – 20%

• Twitter – 14%

• MySpace – 12%

• LinkedIn – 10%

Social media has emerged as a powerful force, which can be leveraged for a wide variety of benefits. Here are the top 5 benefits of social media for students, using which a student can leverage social media.

1. Learning & Networking:

The first benefit of top 5 benefits of social media for students, is Learning and Networking. Learning has gone beyond class-rooms where social learning is promoted in almost all the leading e-learning website. Students can take classes from e-learning websites and discuss their learning’s or doubts using various social media channels. For ExampleNPTEL, Udemy, YouTube, etc. Students can make use of live video that is a part of so many social networking sites to engage themselves in classes. Students can share study materials through social networking sites likeFacebook, Instagram and even Whats App.

In this process of social learning, it’s becomes very important for students to stay connected to peers. Students can make friends with friends of friends and build a strong network. They can get to know many new people and start building new connections with them. Earlier it was very difficult to get any information about famous personalities. Everyone had to just see them on televisions and newspapers. After social media has come to the limelight it is very easy for everyone to follow famous personalities and influential people. Hence, social media has played a very important role in connecting students to the people who they take aspiration from.

Also networking via social media will help students to get to know about the activities and events happening in and around them. Furthermore, they can even get to know about the Hackathons, Quizzes, Sudoku, Marathon, Sports and Cultural competitions and many more. This will give the students an opportunity to participate and win. By participating in such activities students will get to do a lot of extracurricular activities.

2. For Creative Expression:

Social media is a beautiful platform for students to express themselves. Many students will be scared with the thought of what will happen if they express themselves. It helps students to share their thoughts without any fear. Social media allows students to express in many ways, like by posting photos, blogs, individual articles, videos, audio clips etc. This helps students to come out of the box and explore their talents. Such events will identify the student’s talents and give them opportunities further in life.

Compared to before it’s very easy to communicate with others now. This has become possible only with the help of social media. Social media has helped us to do away with the old methods where students had to wait for an opportunity to participate in an event and showcase their talents. From when social media has come into picture it has given students a beautiful platform for them to showcase their talents. Thanks to mechanism like crowdfunding, students can also raise funds for their creative ideas. Many students have their own YouTube channels where they upload videos. Based on the number of views they get payed. Many of them even have their own blogs where they get to write and earn some money through that. Example, Around the World is a blog written by a girl called Sush, who is basically from Delhi.

3. Experience Global Exposure:

Social media is such a broad platform that students can connect with anyone in the world. When it allows students to interact with people on such a broad platform, indeed they get immense knowledge from it, which is amazing, isn’t it. They even get to know about the diverse cultures present around the world. That includes their culture, traditions, language, lifestyle, food habits, and many more interestingly beautiful things. They can even learn about the different courses present in universities from all around the world.

They can watch recorded classroom sessions for particular courses. Such sessions also provide with notes, most of the time. Students can share their ideas and thoughts on a global platform. Social Media gives individual identity to each person. It gives students recognition in such platforms at such a young age which is incredible. Students get a lot of opportunities also. Students will gain knowledge immensely.

4. Employment Opportunities:

As we all know that academia gap, is one of the major issues students are facing nowadays. In Spite of a student finishing his/her degree it’s very difficult for them to get a job. Social media helps them to grab opportunities. Many companies update about openings in their social media accounts. Students following these companies on social media can apply by sending them their resumes. LinkedIn is one such social media platform where students apply for internships and jobs extensively.

Social media helps students to research about the company and get information about all the fields they are interested in. They can read the reviews and comments posted by others and get an overall view of the company. The ratings given by others are also very important for a company. Students can view on social media the ratings given to a particular company. It helps students to be visible. Students can make themselves visible by speaking up confidently and building good relations with everyone. Students can showcase their talents on social media. They can post any of their projects or models which they have constructed. They can even take instructions and help from senior lecturers and professors. Students can take recommendations from their professors or people whom they know. Students can showcase their GIT hub profiles also. For Example, Devendra Dora. These methods will help the students in securing a job.

5. Social Media Marketing:

Let’s talk about social media marketing, in our focus of top 5 benefits of social media for students. Students can promote any college festivals or activities using social media. Every college has a cultural fest every year. Students will have to promote their fest to ensure students from other colleges also participate. Hence, social media helps students to promote on a big platform.

Some students might be doing some work other than the usual curriculum of the schools and colleges. Like for example, work of art and craft or any other work for that matter. They can advertise their work on social media. It is one of the easiest and best way to advertise. It doesn’t cost them anything to advertise also. Social media is a good platform for fund raising. As the number of people using social media are in such huge numbers. It becomes easy for us to collect funds. We can even sell anything on social media. It has got a huge number of users as we said earlier and hence selling any goods is very easy. We can attract customers from all over the world using social media. In the same manner we can buy any item that we are interested in. For example, Vintage Watches. We can even have campus ambassador programs, where a student from each college represents the brand and promotes the brand online.

Conclusion:

As a result of reading the top 5 benefits of social media for students we got to know that, social media has become one of the biggest platform ever in history. Social media has changed so many things. Earlier people used to read the newspaper in the morning, but now everyone looks into their social media accounts for updates. People’s lifestyle is changing because of the evolution of social media. Consequently, everyone is almost an addict to social media in one or the other way. Above all, it is a wonderful place to interact with friends and peers. But if the same thing is used in a wrong way then it becomes very disastrous. Hence, we should use social media up to a limited extent but not beyond that. In this article, we have discussed only about the top 5 benefits of social media for students, but social media is useful to students in many ways.