CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION In today’s world, there is no doubt that social media networks are dynamically changing the way people interact. Text messages are eliminating the need for face-to-face conversations and even simple telephone calls. Social networking allows its users to interact more publically as apposed to text messaging which has more privacy. Social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter allow its users to create profiles and maintain personal relationships as well as create new ones. Ellison, Steinfiled, and Lampe (2007) concluded from early research that social networking use positively related to new connections being made and the maintenance of existing connections. Social networks have different approaches in encouraging connections amongst users. Businesses also take part in social networking to get a better idea of what influences consumers’ thoughts about products and what affects consumers’ participation on social networking. The uses and gratifications theory is an approach to understanding why and how people actively seek out specific media to satisfy specific needs. Social capital can be looked at from different angles, but the focus here is on measuring the bonding, bridging, and linking between Twitter users. The bonding part of social networking is used to keep strong ties between family and close friends. The bridging part of social networking is the way users can connect with other users whom they do not have extremely close ties with like co-workers and classmates. Linking however, is different than bonding or bridging. It is a way for people to be connected to organizations such as banking institutions and political parties. The different capital from social networking and different types of users suggests that users create various strategies to build their social relationships online. College students communicate through different methods such as face-to-face, phone calls, texting, and social networking. Different groups adopt different features of social networking. Studying the differences and similarities in social networking use gives information about preferences and behavioral patters of different groups. It also gives information on how people use social networking to build and maintain social relationships. Whether it be connecting friends with friends, sharing information with a mass audience, participating in collective dialogue about a specific topic, Twitter empowers users to communicate in new, dynamic ways never before seen in today’s society. This study focuses specifically on the use of Twitter for social gain. LITERATURE REVIEW Twitter has changed the way people communicate on a global scale. Users are able to post messages instantly, but can only use 140 characters (Moody, 2010). Almost 10 years after it was founded, Twitter gains an average of 300,000 new users daily (Brown, 2010). Twitter encourages users to communicate in rapidly changing ways. Twitter is “powered by people all around the world and lets them share and discover what’s happening now” (Twitter.com). McQuail’s (2010) study proposed that society and mass media are constantly interacting with each other, which also is consistent with Twitters’ mission statement. Twitter cannot only be used to keep in touch with people, but can also be used as a newsgathering and marketing tool (Ahmad, 2010, p.146). McQuail (2010) said that Twitter fits into several models of communication. Some Twitter users do not engage with others users because they just love the attention of an audience (McQuail, 2010, p 72). However, this is not something all Twitter users’ do. Some of Twitters’ users actively interact with others because they like to be active. The uses of Twitter have been broken down into “passive” and “active” use. Everyone that signs up to use Twitter is active when they sign up, but after signing up the users’ activity may vary. A passive function of Twitter is when users search the network by looking for specific topics, events or people. With more than 600 million searches on Twitter daily, this suggests that one of the gratifications of Twitter is for information (Brown 2010). Twitter users can “follow” other users’, which gives them access to posts from the users they follow. However, users’ do not have to “follow” other users’ to see their posts because they can search for them, which would make the user who searched a more active user. Users have the freedom to follow any celebrity, company, or random strangers in order to receive all of the “tweets” from that account. When users follow accounts they can tweet that account, or relay or “retweet” information to their own followers. The speed of how fast information can travel on Twitter was analyzed by Kwak et.al (2010). When a user retweets, they have the ability to add to the tweet or to add their own opinion on the topic at hand. Retweeting is passive, but addin