INTRODUCTION

Social media is rapidly expanding and being adopted worldwide. It is natural for survey and public opinion researchers to consider adapting their methods to accommodate such new technologies. However, the appeal of social media for research goes beyond just embracing new technology, for several reasons. Social media may represent increased access to survey respondents. At a time when many are eschewing landline telephones (Blumberg and Luke, 2013) or actively taking steps to prevent unsolicited contact (e.g. caller ID, restricted access buildings), much of the population is now communicating and interacting online via social networking sites.

Social media provides an avenue to meet potential respondents where researchers have the best chance of getting their attention and gaining their cooperation. It provides a potentially much less costly data source than a traditional designed survey. In many cases, at least a subset of personal data shared by any given person on social media (depending on user settings and platform features) is freely available to the public. Social media research can be less burdensome on research participants and less intrusive into their daily lives. Rather than taking 15 minutes to respond to a survey or a couple of hours to participate in a focus group, participants may agree once to share certain information and make available a steady stream of data about tastes, preferences, behaviors and choices to researchers without even having to think about it. Insights from research participants may be obtained more quickly through social media. (Antoum, Zhang, Conrad, & Schober, 2013).

Passive social media data capture and analysis enables instantaneous observations; active social media interaction with respondents requires time to recruit and interview, yet is still quicker than inviting them to a lab to participate in an interview or calling them on the phone to collect their opinions.  Social media data collection efficiently enables a broader range of types of analysis, such as the potential to perform social network analyses linked to opinions, sentiment and behaviors without recruiting and interviewing respondents through extensive network sampling procedures.

Social media for opinion research offers impressive potential. As with any other means of data collection, researchers are ultimately concerned with answering their research questions with data that are as accurate as possible. Other practical considerations include the cost efficiency of the method and speed at which the data can be collected, analyzed, and disseminated. If the combination of data quality, cost efficiency, and timeliness required by the study could best be achieved through the use of social media, then there is reason to consider these methods for research. For example, a market research company seeking qualitative insights about use of a particular product may find starting conversations with customers on social media to be more efficient than in-person focus groups.

There are legitimate concerns with using social media in research.  Not every member of the public most particularly in the Buea Municipality uses these platforms and those who do use them in different ways.  The public nature of social media requires significant attention be paid to the barriers for sharing honestly and openly.  Just as with surveys, social media must be viewed practically and objectively and its potential advantages and error sources investigated and documented. The task force is aware that social media research at this time falls under the rubric of nonprobability research. That is, given the constraints of social media access, availability, and adoption, probability sampling of users or of data to represent a known population is not at this time an option. For this reason, social media is a source of insights rather than point estimates and allows researchers to examine the subtleties of opinion and behavior of individuals within their social context, but not in a way that allows generalizability. Although much of this territory is currently unknown, this report summarizes relevant literature and should be viewed as a working document as future research is conducted and these open questions are resolved.

In the last fifteen years, social media became the most used way of communicationwith different opinions from the public with regards to the news it releases. Social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (etc.) and applications such as WhatsApp, Viber, and Messenger are now the way that people (mainly) communicate with each other. Social media and social networks are also the way that companies and brands communicate with their consumers, the way that newspapers publish their stories, etc. We turn to social networks for relevant information, to communicate with friends and families and we as a society practically live a virtual life on social media beside our real lives.

The term social media implies internet services that facilitate social human contact (Paquette,2013). A social network represents a free virtual space where users can share interests, information, experience, pictures, discuss different topics.

This research will try to explain a theoretical framework of social media and social networks with the emphasis on the largest social network, Facebook and how it became what it is today in its brief history of fifteen years. It will also present results of a survey conducted on respondents in the Buea Municipality, gathered through questions about social networks as a source of relevant information.

The public refers to the readers of a book or a newspaper, the spectators of a play or a film, the viewers of a television program, and Internet users who surf the Internet. We also speak in this case of assistance or audience. The term “public” takes this sense at the end of the xvii the century.

According to Yves Citton, the public is a “collection of apparently autonomous and independent individuals, who do not know and do not see each other (unlike a crowd), but who tend despite this spatial separation to think and act in the same way, because they “find themselves” circularly in the media which informs their sensibility and their ideology, according to a logic which depends more on the laws of the market than on direct political control.”

The public is also all the people who frequent businesses, administrations, public transport, etc., in general services which, precisely, are open to the public. In this case, we also speak of customers or users.

More generally, it is all the inhabitants of a region, a country, or even the world.

The public is a mass of people who are not structured, but who can detect trends in opinion, ideas, fashion, etc. To find out about these currents of ideas, we have recourse to opinion polls, which make it possible to specify trends in public opinion

Perception

Perception (from the Latin perceptio, meaning gathering or receiving) is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment.

All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system. For example, vision involves light striking the retina of the eye; smell is mediated by odor molecules; and hearing involves pressure waves.

Perception is not only the passive receipt of these signals, but it’s also shaped by the recipient’s learning, memory, expectation, and attention. Sensory input is a process that transforms this low-level information to higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object recognition). The process that follows connects a person’s concepts and expectations (or knowledge), restorative and selective mechanisms (such as attention) that influence perception.

Perception depends on complex functions of the nervous system, but subjectively seems mostly effortless because this processing happens outside conscious awareness.

Public perception

A belief or opinion, often held by many people and based on how things seem: We have to change the public’s perception that money is being wasted. These photographs will affect people’s perceptions of war. More examples. There is a general perception that exams are becoming easier to pass.

Social media

Social media is the environment in which social networking takes place and has altered the way in which consumers gather information and make buying decisions (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010).  Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) also define social media as an Internet-based application where users can create their profiles and share them with friends, family, colleagues. Social media today represents the global community of every nationality in the world estimated to be the size of China in terms of population. (www.brandba.se). Social media sites also allow users to express a positive or negative opinion about many different topics such as health, politics, brands, etc. (Christodoulides, 2009)

News

News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different media: word of mouth, printing, postal systems, broadcasting, electronic communication, or through the testimony of observers and witnesses to events.

Common topics for news reports include war, government, politics, education, health, the environment, economy, business, fashion, and entertainment, as well as athletic events, quirky or unusual events. Government proclamations, concerning royal ceremonies, laws, taxes, public health, and criminals, have been dubbed news since ancient times. Technological and social developments, often driven by government communication and espionage networks, have increased the speed with which news can spread, as well as influenced its content. The genre of news as we know it today is closely associated with the newspaper.