Social Media Definition : Eplaining the big Trends in 2017 - SocialMaurice
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
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SocialMaurice - Social media is a phrase we throw around a lot these days, often to describe what we do on sites and applications like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and others.
But if we use the term to describe a website like Facebook, and also a site like Digg, plus a website like Wikipedia, and also a site like I can cheezburger, then it starts to confuse. What is social media anyway?
The term is so vaguely used that it can basically be used to describe almost any website on the internet today.
Or maybe not. Some people have more of a limited view of social media, often assimilation to mean the same thing as social networks (a.k.a. Facebook, Twitter, etc). Other people are not eligible to fall under the category of social media blogs.
So what is social media?
Rather than defining the term with a bunch of pesky jargon, which is probably even more complicated, perhaps the best way to get a better understanding of it, is to break it into simpler expressions. For starters, let's look at each word individually.
The "social" part: refers to interaction with other people by sharing information with you and receiving information from you.
The "media" part: refers to a means of communication, such as the Internet (while television, radio and newspapers are examples of traditional forms of media).
From these two different terms, we can have a definition :
social media are web-based communication tools that allow people to interact with each other by sharing and using information.
Characteristics of common social media
The following list of the most common features are dead giveaways from a social media site.
If you are wondering if a particular site can be classified as social or not, try to find at least one of these features.
User accounts: If a site allows visitors to create their own accounts, they can join, then it is a good sign, it will be social interaction. You can't really share information or interact with others online without having to do it through a user account.
Profile pages: Since social media is all about communication, a profile page is often needed to represent an individual. It often contains information about each user, such as a profile photo, bio, website, feed of recent posts, recommendations, recent activity and much more.
Friends, followers, groups, hashtag and so on: individuals use their accounts to connect with other users. You can also use it to subscribe to certain forms of information.
News Feeds: When users connect with other users to social media, they basically say "I want to get information from these people." This information will be updated for you in real time through your news feed.
Personalization: Social media sites generally give users the flexibility to to configure your user settings, personalize your profiles, to find a particular way to organize your friends or followers, manage the information you provide in your news feeds and even give feedback on what you do or do not want to see.
Notifications: Any website or application that notifies users about certain information will certainly play the social media game. Users have full control over these notifications and can choose to receive the types of messages they want.
Update information, recording, or ad: If a site or application allows you to post absolutely anything, with or without a user account, then it's social! It could be a simple text message, a photo upload, a YouTube video, a link to an article or something else.
Like the buttons and comment sections: Two of the most common ways we interact with social media are through buttons that have a "like" comment sections more where we can share our thoughts.
Review, evaluation or voting systems: In addition to loving and commenting on many social media and application websites to review the collective effort of the community, to assess and vote on the information you know or have used. Think of your favorite shopping sites or movie review sites that feature this social media.
What is the difference between social media and social networks?
As mentioned earlier, many people use the conditions of social media and interchangeable social networking as if they mean exactly the same thing. Though the difference is subtle, they are not the same. Social networking is really a sub-category of social media.
The best way to understand the difference between social media and social networks is through the terms "media" and "networking" separately. Media refers to the information you actually share, whether it is a link to an article, a video, a animated GIF, a PDF document, a simple status update, or other.
Networking, on the other hand, has to do with who your audience is and the relationships you have with them. Your network can be people like friends, parents, co-workers, anyone from your past, current clients, mentors and even complete foreigners.
They certainly overlap, which is why it becomes confusing. For example, you can share media with your social network to collect preferences and comments – a form of social networking. But you can also just upabstimmen a link on Reddit, which is a social media platform to help the community and give your word to say in the matter without any intention of building relationships with other users.
Still confused? Try to think about social media like fruit. Apples, bananas, oranges, grapes, berries, melons and pineapples are all part of the broader fruit category in the same way as social networks, social news, social bookmarking, wikis, blogs and private web mail are part of the social media category
Are traditional media also social media?
The traditional media were mentioned earlier in this article, just to show wider examples of the media, but not thinking that television, radio and newspapers are part of the social media deceive. At least not quite yet. The lines drawn between the two are gradually thinner, as everyone evolves.
Social media does not only give you information, but interacts with you while giving you this information. This interaction can be as simple as asking for your comments or letting you vote on an article, or it can be as complex as Flixster recommending movies for you on other people's comments with similar interests.
Think of the regular media as a one-way street where you can read a newspaper or listen to a report on TV, but you have the very limited ability to give your thoughts on the issue. Social media, on the other hand, is a two-way street that gives you the opportunity to communicate.
Are blogs a part of social media?
Copyblogger published an interesting article some years ago, so the argument that blogs are indeed social media, despite the fact that people tend to put them in a category all on their own these days. In fact, blogs are one of the oldest forms of social media that dominated the web long before we were friends and after everyone on social networks.
The main features that are part of the social media blogging are your user accounts, comment sections, and blog networks. Tumblr, media, WordPress, and bloggers are just a few examples of the great blog platforms that have very active Community blog networks.
What are some of the known issues with social media?
Social media is not only fun and games with your friends, celebrities who admire you, and the brands you follow. There are many common problems that most of the major social media platforms have not completely solved, despite their efforts to do so.
Spam: Social media, it's easy for spammers – real people and bots – to bombard other people with content. If you have a Twitter account, you have probably known some spambot following or interactions. Similarly, if you run a wordpress blog, you may have taken a spam comment or two of your anti-spam filter.
Cyberbullying/cyberstalking: Children and adolescents are particularly sensitive to cyberbullying because they take more risks when it comes to posting to social media. And now that we all interact on social media via our mobile devices, most large platforms allow us to share our sites, open the doors of Cyberstalkers to target us.
Self Image manipulation: What a user publishes on social media is only a small part of their lives. While the disciples can see someone who is happy and live through their contributions to social media in a way that that you feel dull or inadequate in comparison, the truth is that users have the authority to fully control what parts they do and do not want to be broadcast on social media to manipulate their own self-understanding.
Information Overload: It is not uncommon to have more than 200 Facebook friends or to follow more than 1 000 Twitter accounts. With so many accounts to follow and so many people viewing new content, it's almost impossible to follow.
Fake news: Fake new websites promote links to their own stories completely false news about social media to drive traffic to them. Many users have no idea that they are in the first place wrong.
Confidentiality/Security: Many social media platforms are always hacked from time to time, regardless of the correct security measures. Some also do not offer any privacy options that users need to keep their information as private as they want.
What does the future have to do with social media?
It's hard to predict something exactly, but if one thing can be said about the future of social media, it will probably be more personalized and less noisy. The part will be less of a problem, and filtering irrelevant information will become a stronger trend.
Snapchat is a social media platform that is truly at the forefront of social media evolution. Rather than blasting updates for all our friends and followers to see, we use Snapchat more than we communicate in real life – with certain people only at certain times.
If something, social media is probably in terms of temporary release for faster, more intimate sharing without the hassle of having to do something to hundreds or thousands of followers who remain, unless it will be deleted manually. Instagram has already made the move towards releasing volatile content with its Snapchat-like stories feature, so that perhaps more platforms will soon follow.
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