Social Media Sites Overview
If you started trying to keep up with all the Social Media sites, you would find yourself overwhelmed before you even got started. There are literally thousands out there and more are coming on board daily. The goal of this blog post is to give you an idea of some of the more popular social media sites.
- Facebook is the most popular Social Media site on the internet. It was started at Harvard for students to keep in contact but has far outgrown that role – the fastest growing demographic are people over the age of 35. This site that enables individuals to keep in touch with friends and family and to make new contacts. It has a number of features such as posting on a wall (sort of like your own short blog), photo posting and sharing and video sharing. Individuals have to agree to connect before they can share information. People can also build your own business Page where you can develop followers, post events, videos, pictures and keep people up-to-date on what is going on with your professionally.
- LinkedIn was created for business professionals to connect and build an online network of contacts. For people to connect, LinkedIn requires for them to have a pre-existing connection or a way to be introduced through others. Its network is based on three levels of connection – people you know (first degree), people your first degree connections know (second degree) and people your second degree connections know (third degree). Some of the strongest features of this site are Answers, Applications, Groups and Recommendations.
- Twitter is a micro-blogging site. What this means is that you can only post an entry (tweet) of 140 characters or less. These “tweets” are sent to everyone who is “following” you. Twitter is a site for friends, family and co-workers to keep in touch with each other. It also allows you to get your word out to a large number of people. This site is used by many large companies to keep track of customer feedback and allow them to get back to those same customers quickly. One of the stronger features about Twitter is that if your friends decide your post is worth passing on, they can “retweet” it out to their followers. Twitter is an excellent brand building tool.
- Besides being the leader in online video, YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet. YouTube has made it very easy for individuals to post and share videos online. As there are millions of videos stored on the internet, YouTube is a treasure trove to find how-to videos on just about any subject one is interested in learning more about. Interested in old clips from the Carol Burnett show? Go to YouTube and you will find them. You can also consider YouTube as a video shelf where you can store all your own videos.
As many of you are aware, this is a very small sample of all the social media sites out there. I wouldn’t even want to hazard a guess as to how many there are out there. My recommendation is to get started on the better known sites and then look around for some others you might be interested in. If you try to keep up with all of them, you will be overwhelmed before you even try.
