www.ijcrt.org © 2018 IJCRT | Volume 6, Issue 1 February 2018 | ISSN: 2320-2882 IJCRT1801523 International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts (IJCRT) www.ijcrt.org 706 Visual Postings on Facebook: A Content Analysis Sweta Ghosh UGC-NET JRF, Ph.D Scholar Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract: The paper analyzed contents of Twelve Facebook users from 16th March 2017 to 15th February 2017. Social media such as Facebook allow people to reach out our friends. We can share our status, personal feelings, events, talents, likings and dis- likings. Facebook plays an important role in our life. We spend most of our time in virtual world. The current study mainly employs content analysis method to determine the the way Facebook has changed world of communication. Content analysis of account holders Timeline revealed that Indians share mainly 25 genres of posts: Friendship, Classic Selfie, Software Edited Selfie, Meme, Event, Archive, Memory, News Cutout, Nature, Groupie, Travel, App Link, Kingship, Romance, Mirror Selfie, Compulsory Shared, Humour, Celebrity, Self Photo, News Link, Hair Selfie, Software Edited Groupie, Food, Self Made Art, and Children IndexTerms – Social Media, Content Analysis, Facebook Profile, Genres of Images, Visual Post ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I. INTRODUCTION New York-based SixDegrees.com launched in 1997, was the first social networking site (SNS) that operated similar to those social networking sites existing today (Social Media, 2013, P 93). The earlier social Internet mainly involved one-to-one or one- to-few conversations, via e-mail or chat, or postings on interest-based group (Social Animals, 2010, P 758). SixDegrees.com integrated several existing software features into a package that closely resembles the later SNS giants, MySpace and Facebook. Social network sites are not unique because they “allow individuals to meet strangers” wi th common interests but rather they enable users to articulate and make their social network visible. The World Wide Web invented around 1990 is the massive Internet-based technology, which allows browsers such as Internet Explorer to use so-called hyperlinks to discover and access the millions of documents and other resources that exist on the Internet‟s connected computers (Social Media, 2013, P 95). On an SNS, a user: creates and displays a public or semi-public personal profile; lists other network users to whom they have offline connections; and reads and often comments on pages created and displayed by network friends and friends of friends (Social Animals, 2010, P 758). The initial social networking sites in the United States were places where people could actively network to find „friends of friends‟ or as in sites such as Friends Reunited to reconnect with friends. After a while these sites were transformed, largely by their users, into places of more constant interaction; this occurred more between established friends, so the sites became less concerned with expansive networking. In a way, therefore, social networking sites did become social media, if the labels are taken literally. The users of social media are described as „networked publics‟, who possessed four main affordances which were persistence, visibility, spreadability and searchability (Miller, Costa, Haynes, McDonald, and Nicolescu, Sinanan, Spyer, Venkatraman and Wang, 2016a, P 10). Social media is the software designed primarily to facilitate social- interaction as the key to draw the public online. Today, social media include social networks such as Facebook that allow people to reach out to friends of friends; the photo-sharing site Pinterest; the collaboratively written Wikipedia encyclopedia; the “user review” sections at retail websites such as Amazon; “virtual worlds” such as “World of Warcraft” where people from around the world meet, compete, collaborate and play adventure games together, and many more (Social Media, 2013, P 83). Most animals have some kind of social interaction with other member of the same species. Human groups are characterized by the constant flow of verbal and non-verbal communication. The etymology of the term “Communication” is Latin “communicare”, which means “sharing” and “transferring.” Communication is defined as interaction between individuals, taking place in dyads and in networks (Håkansson &Westander, 2013, pp. 2-3). Visual communication and sonic communication are essential to vast number of species. It presumably has priority over language, because latter is a relative latecomer in human evolution, however long, it may have existed and been preceded by other forms of auditory communication. Visual communication also necessarily has primacy over writing, not least because writing is present in only a small proportion of societies (even if these encompass the majority of the people now living in the world). The most important way in which visual representation differs from language is that, although it is extremely variable. Visuals forms can differ radically in different cultures and can verge on incomprehensively between one culture to another. Pictorial forms relate ultimately to visual perception and to the phenomenal worlds, to which cognition and representation respond interpretively and toward which they point (Baines, 2007, pp.7-8). II. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY The study aims investigating the way Facebook users are using their accounts for visual posting. Following are the research questions that were inquired through Content analysis of the Facebook Accounts: 1. What types of visual posts are popular among users? 2. Does visual posts by males are differing from female users? 3. Does visual posts by young males are differing from middle age males?