(Updated 06/04/2023)
What is social media or social networking?
Social networking websites – more often called social media – provide a great way to keep in touch with family and friends, and even meet people with similar interests or hobbies.
Facebook is the most popular social networking website. It allows you to create a personal profile where you can share your thoughts, pictures, videos and interests on your ‘timeline’ with your friends and family.
You’ll also be able to see what they’re posting, so it’s a great way to keep in touch. You can also follow organisations and public figures to see their posts.
Facebook offers different privacy settings so you can choose to share your posts only with people you are connected to as ‘Facebook Friends’, or you can choose to be more open and let anyone on Facebook see them.
Twitter is another popular social networking site that enables you to create a personal online profile and post short public messages – known as ‘tweets’ – which are seen by anyone who chooses to follow you; similarly, you will see the tweets on anyone else on Twitter you choose to follow.
Twitter sets a 140 character limit for all tweets (including letters, numbers and spaces), so you need to keep your tweets snappy and to the point.
While Twitter encourages public conversations, it’s possible to hide your profile from anyone you don’t follow, so you can use it just for chatting with friends and family.
For more information visit Age UK’s page on Social Networks
Staying Safe Online:
The internet can be fun and a great way to talk to friends, play games, watch videos and listen to music. But not everyone online is real or honest about who they say they are and not all information on the web can be trusted. Remember to stay safe! For more information click here
