Social Media

What is social Media?

What is social media, there are lot of definitions for this, but before getting into the question “what is social media”, let’s initially define Media, media as we all know is the medium of communication like newspaper, television etc. We come to know about various news and happenings through media. Social media is social medium of communication, to put it more precise social media is the group of online media which shares similar features such as participation, openness, conversation, community and connectedness.  Social media is basically the type of media which lets people to interact online.

When we talk about the regular media, it is one way, since we receive the news but do not have the opportunity to provide feedback. But Social media encourages people to participate in discussion thus connectivity exist between the media and audience. They are also open to our comments, they are designed in such a way where we can provide our feedback, also some sites offer voting and polling which paves way for active discussion.

There are various forms of social media and lets see some of them:

Social Networks:  Social network allows you to create personal web information which you can share with your friends. You can upload photographs, write your likes and dislikes and also get connected to many numbers of people all around the world. At times these sites enable us to trace out lost college and school friends. The most popular social Networking sites are My Space, Facebook etc

Blogs: Blogs has been derived from the word web log. It is a personal journal or we can also call it as diary where the blogger, (the person who writes the blog) writes his own experiences, explains about events, and provides useful links and other tips.

Wikis : In this form of social media we can add information or modify contents, wikis acts as a database. Wikipedia is the most popular website, where you can find

definitions and answers for almost everything, since it has more than 2 million English language articles.

Podcast: In Podcast Audio and video files are made available for download by means of various services like apple and itune.

Forums: Forums are online discussion about various topics, most of the time people prefer to comment about the recent happenings. “What is a social media” is also a topic in the Forums

Content communities: These communities are formed based on a specific kind of content. The most known content communities are Flickr which share photos and You tube sharing videos.

The rise of the social media is incredible and organizations prefer working on the social media to attain their marketing and public relation goals.  When compared with other regular channels, information reaches the end consumer much faster. The social media acts as an instrument to create awareness about brand and to popularize the products.

Social media has gained popularity among most of the people around the world. This strong media has influenced many people by its features and advantages.  Thus Social media has become the integral part in every individual’s life.