SOCIAL MEDIA

noun

1. websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.

Social media are interactive computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks.^[1] The variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available introduces challenges of definition; however, there are some common features:^[2]

1. Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.^[2][3]
2. User-generated content, such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions, is the lifeblood of social media.^[2][3]
3. Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.^[2][4]
4. Social media facilitate the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.^[2][4]

Users typically access social media services via web-based technologies on desktops and laptops, or download services that offer social media functionality to their mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets). When engaging with these services, users can create highly interactive platforms through which individuals, communities, and organizations can share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content or pre-made content posted online. They "introduce substantial and pervasive changes to communication between organizations, communities, and individuals."^[1] Social media changes the way individuals and large organizations communicate. These changes are the focus of the emerging fields of technoself studies. Social media differ from paper-based media (e.g., magazines and newspapers) to traditional electronic media such as TV broadcasting in many ways, including quality,^[5] reach, frequency, interactivity, usability, immediacy, and performance. Social media outlets operate in a dialogic transmission system (many sources to many receivers).^[6] This is in contrast to traditional media which operates under a monologic transmission model (one source to many receivers), such as a newspaper which is delivered to many subscribers, or a radio station which broadcasts the same programs to an entire city. Some of the most popular social media websites are Baidu Tieba, Facebook (and its associated Facebook Messenger), Google+, Myspace, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tumblr, Twitter, Viber, VK, WeChat, Weibo, WhatsApp, and Wikia. These social media websites have more than 100,000,000 registered users.

The variety of evolving stand-alone and built-in social media services makes it challenging to define them.^[2] The idea that social media are defined simply by their ability to bring people together has been seen as too broad, as this would suggest that fundamentally different technologies like the telegraph and telephone are also social media.^[19] The terminology is unclear, with some referring to social media as social networks or social networking services.^[4]

A 2015 paper^[2] reviewed the prominent literature in the area and identified four common features unique to then-current social media services:

1. social media are Web 2.0 Internet-based applications,^[2][3]
2. user-generated content (UGC) is the lifeblood of the social media organism,^[2][3]
3. users create service-specific profiles for the site or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization,^[2][4]
4. social media facilitate the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.^[2][4]

Mobile social media refer to the use of social media on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. Mobile social media are a useful application of mobile marketing because the creation, exchange, and circulation of user-generated content can assist companies with marketing research, communication, and relationship development.^[25] Mobile social media differ from others because they incorporate the current location of the user (location-sensitivity) or the time delay between sending and receiving messages (time-sensitivity). According to Andreas Kaplan, mobile social media applications can be differentiated among four types:^[25]

1. Space-timers (location and time sensitive): Exchange of messages with relevance mostly for one specific location at one specific point in time (e.g. Facebook Places What's app; Foursquare)
2. Space-locators (only location sensitive): Exchange of messages, with relevance for one specific location, which is tagged to a certain place and read later by others (e.g. Yelp; Qype, Tumblr, Fishbrain)
3. Quick-timers (only time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media applications to mobile devices to increase immediacy (e.g. posting Twitter messages or Facebook status updates)
4. Slow-timers (neither location nor time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media applications to mobile devices (e.g. watching a YouTube video or reading/editing a Wikipedia article)