Social Media Explained

While the term “social media” has quickly become a fixture and is often used, it is not always understood. Here is a brief breakdown.

The keyword is “social.” It refers to a place where people interact online, usually organized by groups around common interests. What makes social media “social” is that anyone can post and respond to content. There are presently three main social media categories or types of sites: 1) News; 2) Networks; and 3) User Generated Content.

Social Media Categories:

• Social News: People post and vote or rate news or other content they consider important. StumbleUpon and Digg are popular social news sites.
• Social Networks: People organize into groups along interest lines and communicate with each other with pictures, memos, status updates, email and other applications. Facebook and MySpace are social networks.
• User-Generated Content (UGC): Sites where users can post content and make accessible to the public. Typical UGC formats include comments, ratings, reviews, and other feedback mechanisms. YouTube and Flickr are popular user generated content sites.

So here are highlights on where some social media types overlap the three categories:

• Blogs have features that touch all three of social media categories. Blog content is user generated, may have news value, and is typically viewed by a network of followers. Blogs overlap the social news and UGC categories.
• Twitter is a collection of networks, covering different and varied topics and interests, where users follow each other’s brief updates (or “Tweets”). Twitter overlaps the social news and social network categories.
• RSS, (Really Simple Syndication) allows a person to subscribe to receive new or updated content they are interested in, automatically whenever it is added or updated by the author. Content is made available to subscribers using RSS by creating what is called an “RSS Feed.” RSS overlaps the social network and UGC categories.

Popularity: 2% [?]