1. Introduction
Social media according to previous studies by E. Alwagait et al (2014) is defined as “the internet based applications that allow the creation and exchange of content which is user generated.” One of the most obvious things of social media is that it increases brand-awareness, brand loyalty, it builds brand equity, humanizes a brand, helps you stay top of mind with your customers and it helps you establish you brand as an authority and though leader. Owusu-Acheaw and Larson (2015) stated in one of their articles that in this day-and-age social media is important because it allows for easier communication between people. Additionally, social media gives individuals faster communication, improves sales, makes distributing content easy. Besides, social media is additionally a standout amongst other stages. According to Kolan and Dzandza (2018) the growth of the internet, has resulted in it being used as a tool in which you keep in touch with people. Social media can therefore be seen as something that can influence a majority of society, in correspondence to how they do certain things as well as what they see as important to them. The incentive behind this paper is to center around the general trends and the positive and negative impacts which social media has on the youth, while shifting the focus to young people and implications for academic performance and social relationships on a global perspective moving on to Africa/South Africa.

2. Trends and changes in the use of social media
When you are in your youth it means that you are in a boundless time of your life where you are classified as being youthful, it additionally implies that you are between adolescence and adulthood. It is likewise categorized as the appearance, brilliance, power, soul and so on for who is youthful. Youth is an involvement in one’s life that might shape their level of dependence and can be set apart in various ways according to different cultural perspectives. The focus of this section is to show the trends and changes in regards to the use of social media for both internationally and in Africa/South-Africa perspective. As indicated by (Greenwood et al, 2017) the world is gradually changing due to the overall openness to the Internet. The most frequently used aspect of the internet is social media which can be categorized into different structures such as sites, gatherings, and business systems, photograph sharing stages, social gaming, microblogs, and talk applications and to wrap things up interpersonal organizations ( The force which social-networking has is to such an extent whereby the number of individuals worldwide who make use of it are expected to reach a rate of 3, 02 billion month-to-month active social-media users by the year 2021, which is around 33 percent of the earth’s entire population. An expected 750 million of these users in 2022 are relied upon to be from China alone and roughly 33 percent of a billion will be from India. The region with the highest penetration of social-networks is North-America, where around 70 percent of the population has at least one social media account as of the year 2017, 81percent of the population in The United-states had a social media profile. Ephraim(2013)”Moreover, the use of social networks in South-Africa and on African landmass by and large kept on expanding at a consistent rate with a few different nations like Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Nigeria, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tunisia Namibia, Cameroon, Morocco and Kenya receiving the new origination. The reason for the growth of social media has been accredited in a trend towards purchasing finished goods. By the year 2009, African countries to join the list of countries with significant numbers of persons using social networks”. As indicated by www.crisscrossed.net “in the year 2009, South-Africa had 1, 1 Million Facebook users, morocco 369000 users, Tunisia 279000 and Nigeria 220000. The year 2009 was the year that saw the introduction of a few indigenous long range social-networking sites in Africa. Moreover, controversies are made on which country is Africa’s person-to-person communication monster and this was either between Egypt and Nigeria. It was indeed Nigeria since it is the most populated country in Africa of over 170 million.” Nanji (2018) The major differences of social media use by age, some 88% of 18-29 year old use social media compared with 78% of Americans age 30-49, 64% age 50-64 and 37% age 65+. Americans age 18-24 are significantly more likely to use platforms such as snapchat, Instagram and twitter even when compared with Americans in their mid to late 20’s. In general when it comes to gender, women appear to make use of social Medias more in order to cultivate social associations. An investigation directed by the Pew Research Center (2016) discovered that more youthful females will probably blog than males their own age, even guys that are more established than them. A of blogs contained by Myspace, women were found to be more likely to not only write blogs but to also write about family, romantic relationships, friends and health in those blogs. A past analysis of Swedish social network users found that women were more likely to have expressions of friendship, particularly posting their pictures, naming their closest companions and furthermore composing ballads to them. Lastly, the most popular platform of social media and according to previous studies from Rosamond (2017) Facebook within excess of 1, 8 billion month to month users remain the world’s most popular social network. Social media strategist Vincezo Conseza has been charting the most popular social networks by country since 2009. His January 2017 world map of social media uncovers that Facebook is yet the pioneer in 119 out of 149 countries analyzed. Conseza’s January 2016 map showed Facebook as the number one social network in 129 out of 137 countries. Instagram which has 600 million monthly active users was the runner-up in 37 countries and twitter second in the U.S and most of Western Europe. The second choice for Indians was linked in QQ and WeChat, Chinas most loved messaging apps, and have a considerably big number of users than Qzone. As indicated by Digital landscape in South-Africa (2017) the 18-24 and 25-34 age groups are by a long shot the largest group and most Facebook users and our encounters demonstrate exactly this. Ages 18-24 had Facebook audience of 2200 000 from both females and males. The popular platforms used in South-Africa are Facebook alongside YouTube and Instagram following firmly behind.
3. Impact of social Media
Social media has both positive and negative impact on the youth and their academic performance on both global and African perspective. As indicated by the global study from Social smart team (2018) Students can take in new things from social media, to spread social mindfulness, social media offers students a manner in which they can keep in contact with each other on the off chance that they happen to go separate ways, in conclusion social media provides a platform in which students can demonstrate their creativity as well as forming study groups. Then from the African point of view from previous studies made by Kolan and Dzandza (2018) there are different perspectives which perceive four noteworthy positive parts of social media, it upgrades connections, it enhances their inspiration to learn, it offers customized course and it builds up their cooperative capacity. As stated by Al-Rhami & Othman (2013) “the use of social media encourages correspondence among and between students in virtual urban areas. Some social Medias like Wikipedia urge students to work cooperatively in higher education. Social media allows students and their educators to share information which facilitates and leads to improved learning (Al-Rhami ; Othman, 2013). The negative impact of social media on the youth on an international level. According to previous studies conducted by Owusu-Acheaw ; Larson (2015), the American instructive research affiliation directed an exploration pronounced that it’s a yearly gathering in Diego California. San Miguel (2009) in Owusu-Acheauw & Larson (2015) concentrated on the correspondence between times spent using Facebook and the academic performance of students. The over-all findings indicated that “more time spent on Facebook resulted in slightly lower grades.” Enriquez (2010) in Owusu-Acheaw & Larson (2015) discovered that students who perform multiple tasks between social-media sights and doing homework will probably have 20% lower grades than students who don’t spend their study time on social media.” A study was conducted by Kapinski and Duberstein (2009) that indicated that college students that use social networks have lower grade averages than those who do not (Owusu-Acheauw & Larson, 2015). At the point on the African perspective in previous studies made on academic performance in Ghana shows how the negative effects of using social media on the youth is that they tend to have poor grammar and spelling, late submission of assignments, less study time as well as academic performance. In addition, according to Khan (2009) in Owusu-Acheauw & Larson (2015), Facebook users regularly perform ineffectively in their academics. There are more cons than pros concerning social media with respect to academics,
The exact opposite aspect I will look into with regards to the impacts of social media, is how it can impact the social relationships of the youth. I will also point out the positive and negative impacts from an international and African perspective. The positive impacts on the American point of view as indicated by Kitson (2017) is that social media has impacted on how the relationships the youth have survive themselves. On one hand social media has allowed relationships to be established and sustained from a physical relationship. The negative impact which social media has on relationships of the youth is that it has ruined dating in the sense that the courtship process can be encountered over the internet and it decreases the incentive to make a commitment. Then lastly the positive and negative impacts social media has on the youth in Africa, the positive impacts are according to Modern Ghana, Mensah (2016) Social media encourages us to build our social relationships. As in they probably won’t have the capacity to make friends on grounds thus the youth uses it as a stage to make new friends. Social media helps the youth in building relationships by knowing themselves and probably in the future helping themselves. Then lastly from my findings on the impacts of social media on social relationships, the negative impact(s) according to Mageto (2017) spending long hours chatting on social media decreases productivity amongst the youth. This then leads to the youth not being dependent on themselves but rather on their parents and families. The long hours spent on social media can be used to do something productive, which can enable them to acquire new knowledge. Lastly, social media can also serve as a good platform for cyber-theft and bullying which increases the chances of identity theft (Marsh, 2017).