The use of social media by young Australians has become increasingly popular. This essay will show that social media can have many benefits to young Australians by enabling them to engage with peers, the creativeness it brings out and enhanced learning opportunities. Cyber bullying and privacy issues are some of the challenges that can arise with the use of social media. Firstly Social Networking is becoming more important in schools and universities day after day, because it offers more opportunities of learning and now on teachers take advantage of social networking skills to create discussion forums, videos, class blogs, tutorials etc. Also team -working with students and teachers through online social network it is really helpful, students are able to build stronger school communities and teachers can give extra information to a group of students same time. Facebook, Email sources (Gmail, Hotmail, live, yahoo, and student email) are often used by teachers to contact and communicate with students for out of discussions , feedback, difficulties, and also submission to due assignments when there is no class the day the assignments due. Student can have interchange of different ideas and also it is a big chance to improve them mental level and keep them busy in a way not to get bore. Although student of all age level can explore topics, articles, that they may interested online. Making connections of other students with same interests can learn from each other and swap over knowledge and each of them have the opportunity to learn more about each other different point of view. Also Social media not only benefits schools and universities but also gives workplace opportunities for instance to promote a company’s brand sales and marketing professionals can use social media to introduce and promote new products and services in a way that increases a potential target market exponentially. Social networking sites allow consumers to communicate with each other and to share their thoughts and ideas about the company’s products. Additionally, social media sites provide consumers with the opportunity to “follow” companies products or services or to “tweet” about their experiences, and give them feedback and customers have the opportunity make discussions and gain trust for the products, thereby creating a more personal connection while building brand loyalty and also a very important benefit that social media provides is the fact of sharing the page and suggested to friends list to view or like. Also Engages customers whatever the company sells, whether a product or a service, it has a customer base that can be engaged through social media. But the manner of engagement is unique because social media has revolutionized the style of business-to-customer communications. Customers no longer want to be talked at. Instead, they are looking for organizations to listen, to appropriately engage, and to respond to them. Social media sites are now used as a version of electronic word of mouth and provide a platform for your consumers to not only speak directly to the company, but also for consumers to communicate with each other, sharing reviews or testimonials about specific products or services. Companies that join social media sites are able to create stronger relationships with their customers and are also able to improve customer service by utilizing social media to address customer service issues. Although while most interactions are positive, there are increasing reports of these technologies being used to harass and intimidate others. This has become known as cyberbullying. Young people have wonderful experiences online but unfortunately cyberbullying is one of the main risks they experience there. Cyberbullying can take different forms, from name-calling and abusive comments, exclusion, online impersonation, spread of images without consent to threats of physical harm. It is now a global problem with many incidents reported in Australia. Not only cyber bullying is well known there are few more negative examples of Australian e-crime offences
• Impersonation A student dishonestly obtains someone’s email address and access information and sends an offensive email to everyone in that person’s email address book. The offence: Unlawful operation of computer system.
• Child pornography Uploading a photograph of someone under-age who is naked (e.g., whilst he/she is changing for sport in a locker room and isn’t aware of being photographed and then transmitting it to others). OR (if under-age) Taking a photo of oneself naked and uploading it to a website.
• Hate website A group of students create a racially focused hate website about their classmates. “Fifteen percent of all of the youth reported an unwanted sexual solicitation online in the last year 4% reported an incident on a social networking site specifically. Thirty – three percent reported an online harassment in the last year 9% reported an incident on a social networking site specifically. Among targeted youth, solicitations were more commonly reported via instant messaging (43%) and in chat rooms (32%), and harassment was more commonly reported in instant messaging (55%) than through social networking sites (27% and 28% respectively)”