Social Media Explained

There are three main types of Social Media:

Social Networking

A social networking website focuses on building connections among people. At its most simple, it allows people to connect with their friends, or even strangers who share interests. A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services such as photo galleries.

Examples: Facebook, MySpace

Facebook in particular is a useful method for businesses to notify people of special offers, new products, new developments etc. As Facebook users tend to be “always signed in”, all the business owner needs to do is add a “Join us on Facebook” link to their website and one click (plus a confirmation) is all it takes for that person to join. When a visitor joins the group, their “friends” are also notified which can lead to more website visits out of curiosity.

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organise, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources.

Social Bookmarking differs from a standard Search Engine in that each link is graded by human beings rather than a search engine’s computer algorithm. This can be advantageous but also leaves the index more vulnerable to manipulation by spammers.

Example: Delicious

Social News

Social News is a type of social bookmarking that concentrates on news articles and blog posts.

Example: Digg, Reddit

For news / blog sites, a Social News widget should be added to each article to make it easy for subscribers to Social News sites to share it.

Twitter

Twitter is somewhat unique. It is most akin to a Social Network but its groups are less formal. Anyone can read anyone’s “Tweets”, and anyone can “follow” anyone.

Businesses should ensure they have regular, interesting information to Tweet about.

YouTube

YouTube allows anyone to upload videos for public consumption. Initially YouTube was associated with grainy mobile phone footage taken by teenagers, but recently it has become an amazing repository of top quality content. The quirky stuff is still there, alongside serious stuff.

Businesses should use YouTube for traffic generation:

• Google now shows one or two YouTube videos on its first page of standard web results.
• YouTube is being used as a search engine in its own right, particularly for “how to” / “tutorial” types of video
• It is easy to embed YouTube videos in your website, in fact the JuddWebtoolbox makes this a breeze!