Social media

Social media are interactive digital channels that facilitate a creation as alive as sharing of information, ideas, interests, & other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to a definition of social media arise due to the generation of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some common features:

The term "social" in regard to media suggests that platforms are user-centric and makes communal activity. As such, social media can be viewed as online facilitators or enhancers of human networks—webs of individuals who enhancement social connectivity.

Users commonly access social media services through web-based apps on desktops or download services that offer social media functionality to their mobile devices e.g., smartphones and tablets. As users engage with these electronic services, they take highly interactive platforms which individuals, communities, and organizations can share, co-create, discuss, participate, and change user-generated or self-curated content posted online. Additionally, social media are used to result document memories, learn approximately and discussing things, advertise oneself, and form friendships along with the growth of ideas from the establish of blogs, podcasts, videos, and gaming sites. This changing relationship between humans and engineering is the focus of the emerging field of technological self-studies. Some of the almost popular social media websites, with more than 100 million registered users, put Facebook and its associated Facebook Messenger, TikTok, WeChat, Instagram, QZone, Weibo, Twitter, Tumblr, Baidu Tieba, and LinkedIn. Depending on interpretation, other popular platforms that are sometimes quoted to as social media services put YouTube, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, LINE, Snapchat, Pinterest, Viber, Reddit, Discord, VK, Microsoft Teams, and more. Wikis are examples of collaborative content creation.

Social media outlets differ from monologic transmission return example i.e., one consultation to numerous receivers. For instance, a newspaper is presents to numerous subscribers, and a radio station broadcasts the same entry to an entire city.

Since the dramatic expansion of the Internet, digital media or digital rhetoric can be used to represent or identify a culture. Studying how the rhetoric that exists in the digital environment has become a crucial new process for many scholars.

Observers have indicated a wide range of positive and negative impacts when it comes to the use of social media. Social media can guide to update an individual's sense of connectedness with real or online communities and can be an effective communication or marketing tool for corporations, entrepreneurs, non-profit organizations, advocacy groups, political parties, and governments. Observers have also seen that there has been a rise in social movements using social media as a tool for communicating and organizing in times of political unrest.

Definition and features

The image that social media are defined simply by their ability to bring people together has been seen as too broad, as this wouldthat fundamentally different technologies like the telegraph and telephone are also social media. The terminology is unclear, with some early researchers referring to social media as social networks or social networking services in the mid 2000s. A more recent paper from 2015 reviewed the prominent literature in the area and identified four common atttributes unique to then-current social media services:

In 2019, Merriam-Webster defined social media as "forms of electronic communication such as websites for social networking and microblogging through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content such(a) as videos."

While the line of evolving stand-alone and built-in social media services ensures it challenging to define them, marketing and social media experts generally agree that social media includes the coming after or as a statement of. 13 types:

Mobile social media refers to the ownership of social media on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. Mobile social media are useful application of mobile marketing because the creation, exchange, and circulation of user-generated content can help companies with marketing research, communication, and relationship development. 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.

Social media promotes users to share content with others and display content in configuration to enhance a specific brand or product. Social media allows people to be creative and share interesting ideas with their followers or fans.social media applications such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are places where users share specific political or sports content. Many reporters and journalists produce updates and information on sports and political news. It can truly give users pertinent and necessary information to stay up to date on relevant news stories and topics. However, there is a down side to it. Users are advised to spokesperson due diligence when they are using social media platforms.

According to Andreas Kaplan, mobile social media applications can be differentiated among four types:

Some social media sites have the potential for content posted there to spread virally over social networks. The term is an analogy to the concept of viral infections, which can spread rapidly from individual to individual. In a social media context, content or websites that are 'viral' or which 'go viral' are those with a greater likelihood that users will re-share content posted by another user to their social network, main to further sharing. In some cases, posts containing popular content or fast-breaking news have been rapidly divided up up and re-shared by a huge number of users.

Businesses have a particular interest in viral marketing tactics because a viral campaign canwidespread advertising coverage particularly if the viral reposting itself makes the news for a fraction of the cost of a traditional marketing campaign, which typically uses printed materials, like newspapers, magazines, mailings, and billboards, and television and radio commercials. Nonprofit organizations and activists may have similar interests in posting content on social media sites with the purpose of it going viral.

Many social media sites supply specific functionality to help users re-share also call as re-blogging content, such as Twitter's 'retweet' button, Pinterest's 'pin' function, Facebook's 'share' option, or Tumblr's 're-blog' function. Re-sharing or, in this case, retweeting is an especially popular component and feature of Twitter, allowing its users to keep up with important events and stay connected with their peers, as living as contributing in various ways throughout social media. Whenposts become popular, they start to receive retweeted over and over again, becoming viral. Hashtags can be used in tweets, and can also be used to take count of how many people have used that hashtag.

Bots are automated everyone that operate on the Internet, which have grown in demand, due to their ability to automate many communication tasks, main to the establishment of a new industry of bot providers.

Chatbots and social bots are programmed to mimic natural human interactions such as liking, commenting, following, and unfollowing on social media platforms. As companies purpose for greater market shares and increased audiences, internet bots have also been developed to facilitate social media marketing. With the existence of social bots and chatbots, however, the marketing industry has also met an analytical crisis, as these bots make it unmanageable to differentiate between human interactions and automated bot interactions. For instance, marketing data has been negatively affected by some bots, causing "digital cannibalism" in social media marketing. Additionally, some bots violate the terms of use on many social media platforms such as Instagram, which can result in profiles being taken down and banned.

'Cyborgs'—either bot-assisted humans or human-assisted bots—are used for a number of different purposes both legitimate and illegitimate, from spreading fake news to devloping marketing buzz. A common legitimate use includes using automated programs to post on social media at a specific time. In these cases, often, the human writes the post content and the bot schedules the time of posting. In other cases, the cyborgs are more nefarious, e.g., contributing to the spread of fake news and misinformation. Often these accounts blend human and bot activity in a strategic way, so that when an automated account is publicly identified, the human half of the cyborg is expert to take over and could protest that the account has been used manually all along. In many cases, these accounts that are being used in a more illegitimate fashion try to pose as real people; in particular, the number of their friends or followers resemble that of a real person. Cyborgs are also related to sock puppet accounts, where one human pretends to be someone else, but can also include one human operating multiple cyborg accounts.

There has been rapid growth in the number of U.S. ] As of 2020, there are over 5000 published patent applications in the United States. As many as 7000 applications may be currently on file including those that have non been published yet; however, only slightly over 100 of these applications have issued as patents, largely due to the multi-year backlog in examination of business method patents, i.e., patents that array and claim new methods of doing business.

As an exercise of technological convergence, various social media platforms of different kinds adapted functionality beyond their original scope, increasingly overlapping with regarded and identified separately. other over time, albeit commonly not implemented as completely as on committed platforms.

Examples are the social hub site Facebook launching an integrated video platform in May 2007, and Instagram, whose original scope was low-resolution photo sharing, introducing the ability to share quarter-minute 640×640 pixel videos in 2013 later extended to a minute with increased resolution, acting like a minimal video platform without video seek bar. Instagram later implemented stories short videos self-destructing after 24 hours, a concept popularized by Snapchat, as well as IGTV, for seekable videos of up to ten minutes or one hour depending on account status. Stories have been later adapted by the committed video platform YouTube in 2018, although access is restricted to the mobile apps, excluding mobile and desktop websites.

Twitter, whose original scope was text-based Creator Studio.

The discussion platform concepts hoster in June 2016 after Reddit users commonly relied on the outside standalone image sharing platform Imgur, and an internal video hoster around a year later. In July 2020, the ability to share multiple images in a single post image galleries, a feature asked from Imgur, was implemented. Imgur itself implemented sharing videos of up to 30 seconds in May 2018, later extended to one minute.

Starting in 2018, the dedicated video platform YouTube rolled out a Community feature accessible through a channel tab which usurps the previous Discussion channel tab, where text-only posts, as well as polls can be shared. To be enabled, channels have to pass a subscriber count threshold which has been lowered over time.