Social Media
For those who grew up in an era where mail arrived in a letter box at your front gate, trying to keep up with social media can sometimes be a frustrating and confusing experience.
After all, it’s ruled by a generation for whom flicking between screens on their iPad is more natural than turning the pages in a magazine.
Yet understanding a few basic tricks can help make your online experience more enriching. It can help you keep in touch with your children and grandchildren and keep up to date with what’s happening in your community.
Social media is a generic term for online tools that allow people to share or exchange information, ideas, pictures or videos in virtual communities and networks.
Facebook is by far the most common form of social media, and we know that lots of seniors enjoy Facebook, so we’ve devoted a whole section to that.
Other forms of social media that you might have heard of include:
Twitter - users send and read short 140-character messages called "tweets.” Around the world, millions of tweets are sent everyday. Some celebrities have more than 50million people who follow what they are saying on Twitter.
Instagram – lets users to take pictures and videos, and share them on other social media like Facebook and Twitter. It confines photos to a square shape like the old fashioned polaroid images. Users can also decorate their photos by changing colours and other things. More than 300 million people use Instagram each month.