Small business Web sites blog

Social media, what is it?

Social media is one of the big hype phrases at the moment. But what is social media?

Social media generally refers to Web content that allows people to collaborate, share and comment. It’s a 2 way thing. Traditional Web content is published by the Web site owner and people then read (or look at) that content. It’s a 1 way thing.

Social media tends to be broken into a number of categories:

• Blogging (e.g. Blogger, Twitter, WordPress). Blogs allow you to publish articles which people can leave comments on (just like this one).
• Document sharing (e.g. Google Docs, SlideShare). Share slide show presentations, spreadsheets and other documents with people who can share, make contributions or leave comments.
• Forums (e.g. phpBB, PunBB). People can post subjects on a forum and others can then reply to those posts. Most forums are divided into categories.
• Geosocial networking (e.g. foursquare, Gowalla). Similar to social networking (see below) but is aware of where you are and allows you to share your location with friends.
• Music sharing (e.g. Last.fm, MySpace). Similar to document sharing, you can upload music to share with people and allow them to make comments.
• Photo sharing (e.g. Flickr, Photobucket). Share photos and allow people to comment on them.
• Social bookmarking (e.g. Delicious, StumbleUpon). Create a list of bookmarks that you can access from anywhere and share with anyone.
• Social networking (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn). Lets you become friends with people and then send status updates, share information and make comments.
• Social news (e.g. Digg, reddit). Lets you post news stories and also vote on other people’s news stories.
• Video sharing (e.g. blip.tv, YouTube). Share videos and allow people to comment on them.

In future articles I’ll take a look at how you can use social media to help your small business. I’ll also look at some of the categories and services in more detail.

Are there any other categories or social media services that you’ve used, or would like to know more about?

Tags: Social media

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 at 9:03 am and is filed under Social media.