Social Media

Social Media in Plain English

This video is a reference from our lecturer. It is about Social Media. This video is very nice and different in plain english where everyone can understand social media in a better way. Great analogy between social media and ice cream. It shows how social media evolved and how it is important to business.

What is social media? Social media is online platforms, or sites that focus on building relationships between people. A social networking site contains a person’s profile, information and photos. Anyone can just sign up for an account and start to interact with each other. Based on TNS research, the global average of people access daily the social networking sites accounts is 46 percent. Some examples of famous social networking sites are Facebook and Twitter. Actually, there are both advantages and disadvantages of using social networking sites.

If you are planning to use an online social network for business purposes, there are a few factors that should be taken into consideration.

• The popularity of the network
• The ease in connecting to other professionals
• The ability to create a detailed personal profile

Social media can take on many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking. By applying a set of theories in the field of media research (social presence, media richness) and social processes (self-presentation, self-disclosure) Kaplan and Haenlein created a classification scheme for different social media types in their Business Horizons article published in 2010. According to Kaplan and Haenlein there are six different types of social media: collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia), blogs and microblogs (e.g. Twitter), content communities (e.g. Youtube), social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), virtual game worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft), and virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life). Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing,crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms.