1 Introduction

At present, China has entered the rapid development period of population aging. According to the data published by the state’s Aging office, by the end of 2017, the number of over 60 years old people will account for 17.3% of the total population. It is estimated that the number of elderly population in China is expected to reach a peak of 487 million by 2050. The needs of the elderly have been raised to a level of great concern. As the age increases, elderly people are suffering physiological decline and limited mobility, meanwhile, their response time becomes sluggish. This restriction of mobility often leads to less participation in social activities, which often increases loneliness and reduces satisfaction with life. As we all known that, for the elderly, their health and well-being depend largely on their emotional and social relationships with their family and friends.

To a certain extent, high technology separates older people from society. Older people are afraid of technology and are reluctant to learn new technologies and accept new things. But on the other hand, technology can play an important role in helping the elderly create new social network and maintain these social relationships. It can improve their quality of life by reducing their sense of isolation. Use of social media tools can help us to redefine the role of elderly in today’s global society for educating the youth more effectively [1, 2].

By determining the user environments that are suitable for the elderly, including web page accessibility, interface design and real social life transformation, this article proposes the factors for a social media website, the factors for the elderly to use social media platforms, a social media platform design that can be easily used by the elderly and design factors suitable for the elderly.

The objective of this paper is to propose a framework for a social knowledge management and build a platform for elderly to decrease loneliness and empower elderly people and provide them with a sense of social involve and greater control and self-efficacy.

2 Literature Review

2.1 Social Media

With the rapid development of technology, the term “Web 2” and “user-generated content” appeared along with the evolution of social media in 2004.

Social media refers to Internet based applications based on ideological and technological of Web 2, which is the developer and end-users can utilize the World Wide Web together by continuously modified by all users in a participatory. There is no agreed definition for social media, but there are four commonalities of current social media services is identified by researchers, such as Web 2.0 Internet-based, user-generated content, specific user profiles, and connecting a profile with those of other individuals or groups [3].

Social media can be understood as internet-based applications that create links among users and user-generated content in online environments. The most activity performed among the user is to access and log into the social network to interact with other people via blogs, web forums, social bookmarking sites, photo and video sharing communities, content communities, social networking sites, and virtual games with the goal to consume, co-create, share, and modify content generated by the same users. Nowadays, the most popular form of Social Media is the Online Social Network (OSN), such as Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Skype, Google+, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat [5, 6]. While in China the most popular OSN is WeChat with almost one billion users, which is second only to the number of Facebook users.

WeChat is a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app developed by Tencent. It had over 889 million monthly active users in 2016, 90% of whom were Chinese [4]. One of the Webchat’s core aim is to encourage people to feel more connected by sharing details of their personal lives as a means of socializing with others.

WeChat supports different instant messaging methods, including text message, voice message, walkie talkie and stickers. Users can send previously saved or live pictures and videos, name cards of other users, coupons, lucky money packages, or current GPS locations with friends either individually or in a group chat.

“Moments” is WeChat’s brand name for its social feed of friend’s updates. Moments allows users to post images, post text, post comments, share music, share articles and post “likes.”

WeChat users can register as an official account, which enables them to push feeds to subscribers, interact with subscribers and provide them with services [4].

2.2 Social Media and Elderly People

Technology can, however, also be seen as providing opportunity for building new patterns of family and social bonding for elderly. Prevention and relieve of social isolation and loneliness are the key factors to improve the quality of life of the elderly. The wide availability of mobile communications networks, smart phones and tablets facilitate the elderly to commutation and share information with others through the use of text, voice and image media. In dealing with loneliness issues, social media has the potential to decrease loneliness and increase perceived social support, sense of belonging and feelings of connectedness. The elderly population have recently shown a special enthusiasm for the adoption of new network tools that allow them to share, with a growing network of contacts, links, photos, videos, news and status updates, and consequently improve their skills and opportunities for communication, information searching, knowledge sharing, and relationship building [6, 7].

WeChat application is the most popular social media among urban elders in China. According to official data published by TenCent Company in 2017, there are 50 million monthly active users above 50 years old on WeChat. The use of WeChat text and voice is more than 80%, the utilization rate of “Moments” reached 77%, and the utilization rate of group chat reached 61.7%. Through the ‘Moments’, they can understand the dynamic life of their children and relatives and friends in order to meet the strong emotional needs of their children and relatives. They can express their feelings and wishes at anytime and anywhere to meet the needs of their attention and concern [4].

Active and healthy aging requires maintaining social activities and healthy relationships with others.

Good social connection can prevent aging with anxiety, depression or mental problem. Wellbeing is an important issue for elderly person and it has accepted that social interaction and social activities or positive social life styles can increase the overall wellbeing of elderly. The elderly felt positive attitude toward life and self-acceptance as their social involvement increased [8, 9].

In addition, elders have more life experience, as they have had a long life, they have much knowledge, and if they don’t transfer it to others it will disappear or die with them. They can guide the younger generation in many aspects of life. Therefore, the use of these highly precious elderly wisdom is indeed very important for all of us and for future generations. In general, elderly can be a good source of advice for younger people, particularly in the areas of relationships and in cases of uncertainty. Unfortunately, as a society, we do not readily afford cross generational opportunities for such social interactions and mutual growth. Eliminating existing structural age barriers (for example, providing opportunities for education for all ages, working and leisure opportunities) and increasing communication between generations may lead us to a healthier ageing society. Therefore, if we are concerned about the development of wisdom, we also need to work together to provide creative opportunities, promote its development, and at the same time expand social benefits [9]. The use of social media may be a meaningful move in this direction.

So, it is necessary to explore more opportunities for elderly to enjoy a happy and meaningful life through social media platform which can combine with offline community, which can decrease loneliness and empower elderly people and provide them with a sense of connectedness and greater control and self-efficacy.

3 Research and Methodology

Both qualitative and quantitative research method were adopted in this study. Although social media is becoming more and more popular with the elderly, we still find that the elderly and young people still have their own circle of friends, and they have few opportunities to communicate with each other. Social media make communication between people more convenient, but intergenerational communication is still a serious problem. How to use social media to promote intergenerational communication is the problem we need to study.

Therefore, to test the hypotheses we first distributed online questionnaires to young people (18–35 years old) about the related problems of communication with the elderly, and eventually got 48 valid questionnaires.

Because the senior people are not good at online questionnaire, so we did a deep interview with 3 elderly people in order to study their lifestyle, to know that what we could offer to them to improve their lives and as to whether they are willing to participate actively to share their life experience and wisdom with the others?

4 Findings and Discussion

From the questionnaire, it shows that young people are willing to communicate with the elderly, and they are willing to chat with the elderly and teach the elderly better use of intelligent products. 75% of the participants thought they could learn something from the elderly.

There are 10 older people take part in our interview. We had several open-ended questions for the older participants. Such as “Would you like to communication with young people?”, “Are you willing to help them if they have some questions to ask you?”, “Would you like ask for help from young people?” “Do you familiar with social media?” We chose the typical 3 participants basic demographic in Table 1.

Table 1. Demographic of participants.
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“It would be great if we have the opportunities to communicate with the young people, but the opportunity is too rare. We seldom talk with the young eve our own children. I like swimming and flying kites, and playing Taiji, I hope there are more opportunities to do some exercise together with young people together. I am good at using WeChat, but most of my online friends are almost the same age with me” 72 years old Mr. Wang said.

“I like knit with wool yarn, I can weave different style of sweaters, but young people think that is very old fashioning. I hope I can have opportunities to teach young people do the knitting” 65-year-old Mrs. Zhang told us.

“I was an English teacher before I retired. Now I still like talking English, especially with young people, but I do not have that chance, I often use WeChat to look through international news”. Said Mrs. Zhou, an 81 years lady.

From the investigation, we find that only the social media itself cannot promote the solving of intergeneration problem, the opportunity for young people and elderly to interaction and communication with other still very limit. So, we were planning to design a social platform which can combine online and offline community activity together.

According to the above three participants, we set up a personal image who is having specialties, such as English speaking, knitted and playing Taiji. These skills or specialties should be seen in an online platform. One of the WeChat function is called “Subscription” allowing push content and notification updates for subscribed followers displayed in the subscription area. This subscription platform can show different stories and activity pictures. The community can use this platform to announce different activities which both interested in young people and elderly, such as learn English, learn Taiji or other interesting things.

We analysis the motivation both of young people, elderly, and community organizer (non-profit institution), and profit company. The motivation matrix is showed as Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Motivation matrix

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We called this subscription a name “Zhao Xi”, in Chinese it means “elderly and younger”. Through this online and offline platform, young people can learn life experience and skills from the elderly, while elderly can interact with young people to show their wisdom and feel social connected. Figure 2 shows the interface of the online platform, which can public information of the activity, and the work of the elderly.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Subscription interface

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Information and communication technology (ICT), together with initiatives led by local communities can be used as a tool to help reduce feelings of loneliness and increase the mental well-being of older adults. We are committed to promoting intergenerational communication and interaction, providing a social platform for self-value of the elderly. The platform mainly for providing skills exchange, provide the young people with the opportunity of skill learning and volunteer service, and create a more harmonious and free communication atmosphere for the two generation.

5 Conclusion

This study has been conducted to investigate the role of the social media in helping the elderly to deal with their daily life. The social media tools that designed by us may provide may help in lending a reason for our elderly members to live. In general, social media combined with community activity allows older adults to express themselves, participate in discussions and stay in contact with society. Participating in social networks can empower elderly people and provide them with a sense of connectedness and greater control and self-efficacy.