How to Define Social Media?
A good general social media definition is simply the technologies people use to socialize and communicate with one another. Other ways to define social media involve describing the content people create and share with social media tools, often referred to as user-generated content.Most forms of social media are electronic and allow people to communicate and interact with one another using computers, smart phones and the Internet.
What Is Social Media? How Has the Social Media Definition Evolved?
Social media is quite simply the tools we use to communicate and socialize. Nothing more complicated than that. It's become a catch-all phrase for 21st century Internet media."Media" by itself of course, refers to the technologies people use to communicate.
Since the Internet is making those technologies more social, the term "social media" was coined to refer to the highly interactive qualities of newer forms of electronic media, which allow different ways of communicating and sharing information than traditional mass media such as TV, newspapers and radio.
Most early forms of Internet media were highly social, including bulletin boards, forums and popular online networks such as CompuServe and America Online. But the term "social media" didn't become popular until after 2000, when the rapid rise of social networks like MySpace and Facebook and video-sharing site YouTube brought attention to these media-sharing tools.Their popularity sparked demand for a social media definition and new frameworks for defining social media.
Social Media Definition Varies Widely: Can be Hard to Define Social Media
Social media also sometimes refers to the content created with social media tools, especially "user generated content" created by individuals on websites that encourage content creation and sharing.Social media as a concept, though, typically refers to one of the most fundamental traits of all Internet media, which is the ability to have two-way, dynamic information exchanges. People often define social media to mean media that involves an online "conversation," thus emphasizing the two-way or many-to-many nature of dialogue resulting from the use of social media.
Many Categories of Social Media
Social media takes many forms and includes social networks, which are a subset of the larger social media universe. Social networking refers to the use of services such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, which provide online tools for making, organizing and managing connections with other people. Typically these social networks allow people to form by groups and allow communication among group members.Social Media Definition Includes Blogs, Wikis and More
Social media not only includes social networks, but also blogs such as those created with Blogger and WordPress; and microblogging or instant messaging services such as Twitter. Wikis such as Wikipedia and others also are a form of social media.
The social media definition also is broad enough to include file-sharing technologies such as BitTorrent, video-sharing services such as YouTube and photo-sharing services such as Flickr.
There are literally thousands of other, more specialized services such as Meetup for events and Groupon for social shopping that qualify as social media, too.