Today’s social media has undeniably transformed our means of communication, created new opportunities for brands and universities and even brought personality back into a digital world.

Facebook Live became available to the public in April 2016 and instantly changed social media as we know it. At first it began as a way to innocently share even more with your friends, but then it became increasingly used for serious matters. Facebook Live has ended up revealing a lot about our society, from police shootings to a look at the increasing rate of opioid overdose deaths. On the positive side, it has created a launchpad for these more serious conversations to be had. Thanks to these Facebook Live videos, these controversial moments are not just being talked about, but also building momentum behind creating a positive change.

An overarching theme in this article is interaction. Millennials love to interact with content, so why not the news?

All of this interactive content has lead to journalism becoming attractive to millennials again.

By sharing moments in this way, a university can create a sense of community and become relatable to current and prospective students.

It has already been a year since both Snapchat and Instagram announced the next generation of storytelling: Memories and Stories. These social media channels enable users to not just share the best picture out of their daily experiences; it encourages them to share the full story. Through Instagram, Facebook, AND Snapchat stories many users channel their creativity to share their day from the moment they wake up, to the moment they go to sleep.

For example, tapping on the “Rio” feed instantly transports users to the lively city in Brazil and provides a peek at life through the eyes of everyday citizens.

Social media has created a way for people to constantly update and share content with their friends with little effort. Whether it is posted forever on a timeline or a couple seconds in a Snap, a picture is worth a thousand words and social media has created the perfect medium to share these visual stories with friends.

Instagram Stories and Snapchat have changed the game by making messages and content available to view for only 24 hours. In order to remember what was said, or seen, and reply appropriately, the user must reply as soon as they’ve opened it. In effect, these temporary messages take away the ability to dwell and create a more real-time form of communication.

The most important thing to understand is that no matter what platform you look at, social media as a whole has informed and shaped millennial culture through gifs, sound bites, chats, brief moments, and temporary flashes of content. Let’s take a look at how all of these social media thrills are affecting the way we communicate.

With 328 million monthly users, and 36 percent of 18-29 year olds using this platform, it can seem like the next best way to reach potential students.

With 2.01 billion monthly users, and 88 percent of 18-29 year olds using this platform

Let’s take a look at what each of the most used social platforms have contributed to our new way of communication and how you can utilize them in your higher education marketing campaigns.

There are currently 2.8 billion social media users worldwide. This means that over a third of the world’s population is using some form of social media to communicate, making social media marketing an imperative tactic for boosting leads for higher education programs. While social media is a commonplace platform for communication today, have you ever considered how significantly social media changed the way we communicate?

Under pressure from privacy activists, the scientific community has created a body called the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing coalition in Switzerland, led by Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, to create standards for apps being developed that adhere to European laws around privacy. The GSM Association, the mobile telecoms trade body, has also published a blueprint for best practice in how data gathered through apps is handled. 

Many of these issues come to a head with the health apps which have been widely used in Asia and are gradually being introduced in Europe to track an individual’s health status. 

Some researchers are not convinced by the claim that such data sets are completely anonymous. A 2019 study by researchers at Imperial College London and Belgium’s Catholic University of Louvain revealed there is a way to re-identify 99.98 per cent of individuals with just 15 demographic characteristics using location data. Other studies have come to similar conclusions that individuals can be identified based on aggregate data sets with relative ease. Spain’s far-right Vox party has urged people to turn off their mobile data, reflecting the anger over government intrusion on their privacy.

Still, assurances from officials and industry executives have done little to appease anxiety that privacy rights could be brushed aside as governments seek to use tools of mass surveillance in their efforts to combat the virus. The concerns about political use of data have been aggravated by the fact that the European Commission wants the telecoms companies to provide the actual aggregated data, not just access to insights from that information. 

The industry insists that data about users is of little use for big data analysis of the contagion: the best way to track the spread of the pandemic is to use heatmaps built on data of multiple phones which, if overlaid with medical data, can predict how the virus will spread and determine whether government measures are working.

European telecoms companies remain adamant that the information that has been provided to governments is anonymised and aggregated. That means it cannot be traced to any specific individual or phone. The process of scrubbing the data usually takes between 24 and 48 hours before it is available in data sets that can then be used by governments.

In cities such as Madrid and Milan, telecoms operators have created heat maps that show how restrictions on movement are working and what effect the presence of police on the streets is having on behaviour. Telecoms companies in Spain were able to show that the movement of people in one city dropped 90 per cent during the first week of the lockdown and a further 60 per cent of the remainder in the second week, while in Italy the lockdown was largely ignored for the first week, with between 800,000 and 1m people still travelling in and out of Milan. 

The use of location data to track the disease has been applied in Italy, Spain, Norway and Belgium, with the UK, Portugal and Greece set to follow.

“It is not a question of spying on everyone forever but of saving lives for a time that demands temporary rules,” he says. “We trust Uber to know everywhere we go, we trust Gmail with everything we write. If we don’t trust the NHS with our health data then who do we trust?

“The use of technology should end as soon as the health of the people is guaranteed. We must be vigilant,” he says. “If you go to one extreme, you’ll have super high privacy but then you die and it becomes useless to have privacy. It’s a very delicate balance to reach.”

China and Israel have also used personal telecoms data to trace coronavirus patients and their contacts. Governments around the world are creating apps to gather more personal data, such as who is sick and with whom they have been in contact.Even the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which was adopted in 2018, has a clause allowing exceptions for cases that are in the public interest. 

In South Korea, which is seen as a benchmark of how to control infectious diseases, the authorities can require telecoms companies to hand over the mobile phone data of people with confirmed infections to track their location. The data has enabled the rapid deployment of a notification system alerting Koreans to the movements of all potentially contagious people in their neighbourhoods or buildings.

The debate over the use of location data sets could be a forerunner to a broader discussion about civil liberties and surveillance in Europe and the US as governments put in place plans to lift at least parts of the lockdowns

But the use of such data to track the virus has triggered fears of growing surveillance, including questions about how the data might be used once the crisis is over and whether such data sets are ever truly anonymous. 

Mapping how populations move between locations has proved invaluable in tracking and responding to epidemics.

When the World Health Organization launched a 2007 initiative to eliminate malaria on Zanzibar, it turned to an unusual source to track the spread of the disease between the island and mainland Africa: mobile phones sold by Tanzania’s telecoms groups including Vodafone, the UK mobile operator.Working together with researchers at Southampton university, Vodafone began compiling sets of location data from mobile phones in the areas where cases of the disease had been recorded.