Social media is a complex term to define. The sites it refers to vary widely from MySpace to Wikipedia and as we all know they offer different two different words to their daily visitors. We will try to define social media and see and its uses.
Social Media explained
The term in itself is made up of two words: social and media. The first means something that is strictly related to society and the media defines all communication standards from printed such as newspapers and magazines to audiovisual such as television and radio.
In the internet world, a social media site is an interactive website that doesn’t just offer information but asks for your opinions through comments or a poll about the latest trends. Flixter, for example recommends movies you might like based on others’ opinions but share the same interests with you.
As opposed to other types of media, social media lets you take part in the process. If you are watching the evening news, you cannot comment directly to the television newscaster of the reporter. You are given the opportunity to communicate and express your opinions with social media.
The difference between Social Media and Social News
Journalists and reporters and radio presenters are referred to as people working in the media. A social news site is a website which gives news but lets you comment about it. It therefore falls under social media sites. However social media and social news are not the same. A social news site is part of the social media group, but even a wiki and a social networking site belong to it. This means that social media is a very broad definition under which a variety on interactive actions and services take place.
Examples of Social Media sites
Social media sites are becoming more popular, since, as we said earlier, they give the opportunity to the general public to participate actively. You can interact with other people as well: you are not simply typing or clicking on your computer. There are thousands of sites on the internet that can be defined as social media and the trend of creating more similar sites is increasing because it is giving a chance to people to discover new things and making contact with others at the same time.
Here is a list of categories and a few social media websites included in each:
- Social Bookmarking. (Del.icio.us, Blinklist, Simpy) You can bookmark and tag websites you like and other people can browse through your list and vice versa.
- Social News. (Digg, Propeller, Reddit) Comment or vote (or in some cases both) on news items and articles.
- Social Networking. (Facebook, Hi5, Last.FM) Create a community of friends with which to interact, comment share events, discuss and create groups.
- Social Photo and Video Sharing. (YouTube, Flickr) Share your photos and videos online with the general public and let them comment on your photos and videos and in turn you can comment on theirs.
- Wikis. (Wikipedia, Wikia) Add new articles or edit the ones already in the database.
There are many other social media sites. These are just an example. If you can directly interact on a website, then it is social media site.