Social media has overtaken society like a storm — it connects everything.

Want to hear the latest thing someone said? There’s Twitter.

If you want to know where your friend went on vacation, there’s Instagram.
Turn to Facebook if you want to see who is getting married and having kids.
Social media has given us the possibility of getting connected in seconds, but many people have misconceptions about what Millennials do with their phones. They may say that “You’re wasting your time on your phone” or “You need to talk to people.” However, social media isn’t just about scrolling through posts anymore.

The change in social media use has been apparent.

I explored these new trends and asked people why they use social media.

I had the chance to converse with Layton Elledge, who now runs his own pest control business. We talked about why they use social media and how it’s a benefit to them.

“We don’t send out emails to inform of meetings anymore,” Elledge said. “We simply just upload a post on Instagram, and everyone is instantly notified of any news. It has made everything easier.”

Many people use social media for communication.

Now you can talk to people across the country without having to buy international minutes from your phone service; now, you connect to WiFi and you can speak to an exchange student from Germany.

I also had the opportunity to visit with Stephan Jacob, co-founder of Cotopaxi, and asked how they use social media.

“We were built on social media,” Jacob says. Cotopaxi didn’t need to advertise what they were doing; social media did that for them.

By catching people’s attention with llamas on college campuses, all the posts and reposts of those llamas had them trending on Twitter, which was a real gamechanger for them.

But not everyone runs a business or plans on running one.

Many of us use social media as the means for sharing and seeing what we love. Not everyone I talked to had such business-oriented reasons.

Many use it to look at photos on Instagram; it’s a way to kill time, to stay updated with family. Some didn’t want any of those things, so they got rid of it.

Whatever the reason, social media influences us every day, and it’s changing on an upward slope.

Millennials are the cause of this change, and it’s only getting better.
But why do you use social media?