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Stay in touch with friends overseas – useful apps and tech

29th September 2017 Posted by: Lina Cárdenas

To study abroad opens a lot of opportunities for meeting new people and therefore making new friends but it’s important to stay in touch with friends and family back home and share your experiences with them.

Here are the most popular ways to connect with your loved ones:

Email

Electronic mails come in very handy when sending long letters. There are no restrictions on length or the number of receivers, and you can attach files, such as photographs. Many email platforms also provide chat and video call services.

Student World Online | Keep in touch

Video-calls

These are very popular thanks to Facetime (on Apple devices) and Skype. Another you might not have tried is Google Hangouts which has slightly lower quality video quality than Skype, but the sound and connectivity are very high quality and it supports multiple video-calls at the same time.

Social networks

Facebook allows posting statuses, pictures and stories and it has a companion app through which you can send messages in text and picture form. You can also make video calls.

Snapchat has become more popular, especially, among its target age group of teenagers, who use it to share pictures and videos with their friends. The particular feature of this app is that everything that you share, messages included, disappear in 24 hours!

Instagram is mainly image focused. You can publish photos and videos with brief captions, share stories (which last 24 hours) send short private messages.

Student World Online | Keep in touch

Messaging apps

The most popular apps for messaging varies by location. For instance, Viber is very popular in East Europe, Facebook’s messenger in North America and Oceania, Line in some Asian countries and WeChat in China. WhatsApp is the number one messaging app in 109 countries, mostly Europe, Africa and Latin America. Its new updates make it more functional to its users now reaching 1000 million per month. You can post a status or story for your contacts to see it, but most importantly you can make calls and video calls.

And finally, a low-tech but feel-good solution is to handwrite a letter, postcard or to prepare a small package. It might take a while to arrive but everyone loves to receive exciting post!

 

 


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