"Social media", a phrase that seems to be self understandable but indeed can work wonders. What do we mean by social media? In layman terms, experts would define social media as an interface that brings society closer. Actually quite close to what dictionaries and web definitions say about social media. Social media is a medium that connects or facilitates societies to interact and exchange their personal data and designs with each other with the help of modern gadgets and technology, like mobile phones and with the help of various internet services.
In today's world where technical knowhow has grown in full swing, people spend almost twice as much time on internet as they use to do watching TV and reading newspaper. What people do on internet? The most common answer would be socializing - which comprise of chatting with friends and family, emailing, surfing internet sites that offers you to read newspapers and magazines, talks about travel, gives information about education and many more.
In past and even today, we have other mediums present in the society. Then why is social media given so importance? Newspapers, magazines, radio and TV channels are all part of either print or electronic media. But they are interactive only up to certain limit. For example: If you come across some news on TV channel, that seems to be controversial and lacks the real information, you can't react on the spot and give your comments or views on the said news. But had it be social media, it would have been interactive where there is two-way flow of ideas. Internet is informative and the enhanced web technology has helped us develop different medium of social media. The most popular forms of social media are social networking, content community, opinion polls and influential communities.
The well-liked websites for social networking are Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn. For content community the well-known sites are Picasa, Flickr, photo bucket and YouTube. For opinion polls and review the most popular ones are trip advisor, mouth shut and e-opinions. The influential communities are those who can provide real information without misleading the society and the popular ones are wiki, Wikipedia, wiki spaces and wikimapia.
Social media has seen years passing by and it has changed as per the advancement in technology and changing trends. 2010 has given us knowledge about many good practices which have been absorbed by social media and 2011 is the time to reveal them. Some of the predictions are:
1. Biggies grow and cement their positions: Social networking biggies like Facebook and LinkedIn have shown their popularity in past few years. Facebook has acquired around 9 companies to get hook of excellent resources. It even intends to incorporate lifestyle enhancement tools like shopping resources into its network. The Facebook credit program will boost its revenue and will become reliable platform for people to shop. It has even changed the look and feel to encourage more people to spend most of the time on net being connected via Facebook. Facebook and LinkedIn will come up with their IPO and make their positions stronger.
2. Some will fade away: Growing popularity and shifting trends in some social networking websites will tend to wipe off some of the known names like Orkut, Twitter, MySpace and foursquare. Some of the other will come up with different niche and try to rebrand their websites to attract the new potential peers in society.
3. Swing in mobile technology: Though the world around us is involved in socializing via mobile interface and applications provided by Facebook and Gowalla, there is much more to come. With companies like yahoo, Google and apple researching on different applications to come up with advertising on mobile - an unexplored part of social space, the world can see beyond the personal computers, laptops and tablet to reach to the potential businesses.
4. Enriching content: Businesses are now concentrating on enhancing their brands by adding value to their deliverables. Time has come to win the user's trust and that could be possible only by engaging them in improved social networking experience.
5. Hard times for biggies in some fields: Google has an expertise in search engines. It has tried hard to jump into social networking. It has made honest efforts to pull in best available resources to boost its social networking platform, but has failed and 2011 doesn't see much change in it. Rather it can materialize on other parameters like media advertizing and gaming.
Most recently statistics have proved that in America, almost 22% of time spent on internet is via different forms of social media. Looking at the statistics a little more in depth, it is quite predictable that the field of social media is growing and will work it's magic even in 2011.
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