More than Facebook

When you hear the words social media, the first thing that may come to mind is everyone’s favorite...FACEBOOK.    You would be correct.  Facebook, along with MySpace and Twitter are among the world’s most popular social networking sites.  Did you know that social media is not just about social networking but it has other components that make it the unique technology it is today?  Social Media is defined differently for its various forms.   Social News, Social Networking, Social Bookmarking, and Social Photo Sharing are all huge parts of Social Media.  There is a difference between them and they all have a different approach and are targeted to different audiences.  Take a look at the image below and see all the different types of Social Media.

Lets explore the various types of Social Media.

Social News Sites

These sites are primarily meant as a source of news and information.  Users visit these sites for news and to exchange useful information.   Digg is an example of a social news site.   It is the largest and most popular social news site and it covers everything from politics, entertainment, technology, and general news.   Other examples of social news sites are Reddit, Propeller, and Slashdot.

Social Networking Sites

These sites help you stay connected with friends and family.  They are great for building online communities of people who share a common interest.  Communication is mostly in the form of direct mail, instant messaging or posting on a user’s profile.    There has been a recent development where you can now video chat through the social network.  Examples of some very popular social networking sites are Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Google+ (Google+ right now is by invite only).

Social Sharing Sites

These are sites uses as a medium to share different types of information such as photos or videos.  YouTube is one of the most popular social media sites with one of the highest number of users.  This site allows you to upload and/or share videos.  Also you can watch music videos, movies/movie clips, and instructions on how to do something.  Another social sharing site is Flickr.  It is the largest Photo sharing site which hosts more than 3.6 billion images.  This site is good for uploading and sharing personal pictures.

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking is a way of managing the bookmarks of the web pages users save on the internet.  The bookmark can be private, public, or shared with a limited number of people.  Delicious is site used for storing, sharing and finding new bookmarks.  Blinklist is an older bookmarking site and it is mainly used form personal and social bookmarking services.

Wiki

This is a tool for creating and sharing knowledge.  A wiki is a collaborate website that lets the user create and edit the web pages and the contents.    Wikipedia is the most famous wiki and it has about 13 million articles written by users around the world.

I encourage you to check out some of these sites, if you have not already done so, and explore the different aspects of how they work.   You may just find a few of them interesting.