Social Media: Definition, Importance, Top Websites & Apps. Pros & Complete Beginner’s Guide[2024]

What Is Social Media?

Social media refers to a variety of technologies that facilitate the sharing of ideas and information among their users. From Facebook and Instagram to X platform (formerly Twitter) and YouTube, more than 4.7 billion people use social media, equal to roughly 60% of the world’s population.1 In early 2023, 94.8% of users accessed chat and messaging apps and websites, followed closely by social platforms, with 94.6% of users.2

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Social media is digital technology that allows the sharing of ideas and information, including text and visuals, through virtual networks and communities.
• Social media typically features user-generated content that lends itself to engagement via likes, shares, comments, and discussion.
• More than 4.7 billion people around the world use social media.
• Social media is credited with helping people build community and faulted for facilitating disinformation and hate speech.
• Social media is also an increasingly important part of many companies’ marketing campaigns.
• The largest social media platforms worldwide are Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, and WeChat.

How Social Media Originated and Evolved

Social media started out as a way for people to interact with friends and family but soon expanded to serve many different purposes. In 2004, MySpace was the first network to reach 1 million monthly active users.

It participation exploded in the years that followed with the entry of Facebook and Twitter (now X platform). Businesses gravitated toward these platforms in order to reach an audience instantly on a global scale.

According to Global Web Index, 46% of internet users worldwide get their news through it. That compares to 40% of users who view news on news websites. Gen Z and Millennials were most likely to view news on social sites versus other generations.

It plays a key role in many businesses’ marketing strategies, not surprising given the sheer number of hours people spend each day on social websites and apps. At the same time, it is an ever-changing field, with relatively recent apps such as TikTok, Signal, and Clubhouse joining the ranks of established social networks like Facebook, YouTube, X platform, and Instagram.

How does social media work?

Every social media platform works differently and has its own unique set of features, however there are a few commonalities. Here are some of the most common features social media platforms share:

• Profile: Most social media platforms will have users create their own personal profile or a business profile, which is where they can upload a profile photo, add information in a bio, and create their unique account name.
• Sharing content: Each its user has the ability to share content from their personal profile, but the type of content varies from platform to platform; for example, on Twitter and Facebook you can share text, photos, short videos, and more, while on TikTok you can only share pictures and videos.
• Direct messaging: A private form of communication between users on social media platforms; while some social media platforms have direct messaging as the main feature, like WhatsApp or WeChat, others have it as an additional feature, for example, Instagram Direct Messages or Facebook’s Messenger.
• Algorithm: All social media platforms use an algorithm to determine which content to display to users, and in what order; most algorithms are designed to deliver the content a user is most likely to engage with, based on previous content they’ve interacted with.
• Feed and timelines: Most platforms aggregate all published posts from accounts you follow, suggested posts based on what you like, and relevant ads in a single feed or timeline.

What Social Media Is Used for Today

Its platforms are often divided into six categories: social networking, social bookmarking, social news, media sharing, microblogging, and online forums.

These diverse platforms serve a vast range of purposes and user interests. Some appeal to hobbyists, others to people in their work lives. People use them to find others across the globe who share their political or other views. Entertainers use it to engage with fans, politicians with voters, charities with donors. Governments often turn to social media to convey vital information during emergencies.

For businesses, it has become a key marketing tool. Companies use it to find and engage with customers, drive sales through advertising and promotion, identify fast-moving consumer trends, provide customer service or support, and collect data on users, sometimes surreptitiously.

94.6%

Percentage of internet users age 16 to 64 who visited a social networking site in the past month.

What are the benefits?

It provides several benefits, including the following:

• User visibility. Social platforms let people easily communicate and exchange ideas or content.
• Business and product marketing. These platforms enable businesses to quickly publicize their products and services to a broad audience. Businesses can also use it to maintain a following and test new markets. In some cases, the content created on social media is the product.
• Audience building. It helps entrepreneurs and artists build an audience for their work. In some cases, social media has eliminated the need for a distributor, because anyone can upload their content and transact business online. For example, an amateur musician can post a song on Facebook, get instant visibility among their network of friends, who in turn share it on their networks.

What are the challenges?

It can also pose challenges to individual users, in the following ways:

• Mental health issues. Overuse of social apps can result in burnout, social media addiction and other issues.
• Polarization. Individuals can end up in filter bubbles. They create the illusion of open discourse when the user is actually sequestered in an algorithmically generated online community.
• Disinformation. Polarized environments foster the spread of disinformation where the perpetrator’s intent is to deceive others with false information.

Businesses face similar and unique social media challenges.

Productivity concerns. Social interaction, whether online or in person, is distracting and can affect employees’ productivity.

Offensive posts. Conversations on intranets and enterprise collaboration tools can veer off into non-work-related subjects. When that happens, there is potential for co-workers to disagree or be offended. Controlling such conversations and filtering for offensive content can be difficult.

Security and retention. Traditional data security and retention policies may not work with the features available in collaboration tools. This can raise security risks and compliance issues that companies must deal with.

What are enterprise social media best practices?

It is important for companies to have a social media strategy and establish its goals. These help to build trust, educate their target audience and create brand awareness. They also enable real people to find and learn about a business.

Here are some social media social media best practices for companies to follow:

• Establish social media policies that set expectations for appropriate employee social behavior. These policies should also ensure social media posts do not expose the company to legal problems or public embarrassment. Guidelines should include directives for when an employee must identify them self as a company representative and rules for what type of information can be shared.
• Focus on platforms geared to B2B marketing, such as Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Put in place an engaging, customer-centric strategy in social media campaigns. An example would be to use Twitter to field questions from customers.
• Include rich media, such as pictures and video, in content to make it more compelling and appealing to users.
• Use social media analytics tools to measure user engagement with content and to keep on top of trends.
• Use a conversational voice in posts that comes across as professional but not rigid.
• Shorten long form content to make it social friendly. Lists and audio and video snippets are examples.
• Embrace employees and customers talking positively about the organization and repost that content.
• Check in on analytics and management tools frequently, if not on a daily basis, as well as the social media accounts.

The Top 10 Social Media Platforms Worldwide

These were the most widely used it providers as of January 2023, according to DataReportal:

1. Facebook (2.96 billion users)
2. YouTube (2.51 billion users)
3. WhatsApp (2 billion users)
4. Instagram (2 billion users)
5. WeChat (1.31 billion users)
6. TikTok (1.05 billion users)
7. Facebook Messenger (931 million users)
8. Douyin (715 million users)
9. Telegram (700 million users)
10. Snapchat (635 million users)

Interestingly, two that are especially well-known in the U.S.—X platform and Pinterest—didn’t make the top 10 list globally. X platform was 14th, with 556 million users worldwide, while Pinterest was 15th with 445 million.

What Is the Most Popular Social Media?

Globally, the most popular site is Facebook, with close to 3 billion users, according to one recent estimate.

How Much Time Do People Spend on Social Media?

Internet users age 16 to 64 worldwide spent a daily average of 2 hours and 31 minutes on social media as of late 2022, according to DataReportal, which adds that “social media now accounts for its greatest ever share of total online time, with almost four in every 10 minutes spent online now attributable to social media activities.”

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is the use of social networks as a sales and marketing tool. Companies with products or services to promote can go beyond traditional advertising to build an online presence and engage directly with their customers.

In particular, its marketing has opened up opportunities for local businesses to reach out to potential customers without spending a fortune on ad placement.

Know more: https://gemini.google.com/app

What are the business applications?

In business, it is used to market products, promote brands, connect to customers and foster new business. As a communication platform, it promotes customer feedback and makes it easy for customers to share their experiences with a company. Businesses can respond quickly to positive and negative feedback, address customer problems and maintain or rebuild customer confidence.

It is also used for crowdsourcing. That’s the practice of using social networking to gather knowledge, goods or services. Companies use crowdsourcing to get ideas from employees, customers and the general public for improving products or developing future products or services.

Examples of business to business (B2B) applications include the following:

• Social media analytics. This is the practice of gathering and analyzing data from blogs and social media websites to assist in making business decisions. The most common use of social media analytics is to do customer sentiment analysis.
• Social media marketing (SMM). This application increases a company’s brand exposure and customer reach. The goal is to create compelling content that social media users will share with their social networks. A key components of SMM is social media optimization (SMO). Like search engine optimization, SMO is a strategy for drawing new visitors to a website. Social media links and share buttons are added to content and activities are promoted via status updates, tweets and blogs.
• Social customer relationship marketing. Social CRM is a powerful business tool. For example, a Facebook page lets people who like a company’s brand to like the business’s page. This, in turn, creates ways to communicate, market and network. Social media sites give users the option to follow conversations about a product or brand to get real-time market data and feedback.
• Recruiting. Social recruiting has become a key part of employee recruitment strategies. It is a fast way to reach a lot of potential candidates, both active job seekers and people who were not thinking about a job change until they say the recruitment post.
• Enterprise social networking. Businesses also use Enterprise social networking to connect people who share similar interests or activities. These applications include internal intranets and collaboration tools, such as Yammer, Slack and Microsoft Teams, that give employees access to information and communication capabilities. Externally, public social media platforms let organizations stay close to customers and make it easy to conduct market research.

What are the different types of social media?

The four main categories of social platforms are these:

1. Social networks. People use these networks to connect with one another and share information, thoughts and ideas. The focus of these networks is usually on the user. User profiles help participants identify other users with common interests or concerns. Facebook and LinkedIn are good examples.
2. Media-sharing networks. These networks focus is on content. For example, on Youtube, interaction is around videos that users create. Other media-sharing networks are TikTok and Instagram. Streaming platforms like Twitch are considered a subset of this category.
3. Community-based networks. The focus of this type of social network is in-depth discussion, much like a blog forum. Users leave prompts for discussion that spiral into detailed comment threads. Communities often form around select topics. Reddit is an example of a community-based network.
4. Review board networks. With these networks, the focus is on a review, usually of a product or service. For example, on Yelp, users can write reviews on restaurants and endorse each other’s reviews to boost visibility.

What are examples of social media?

Here are some examples of popular web-based social media platforms:

• Facebook is a free social networking website where registered users create profiles, upload photos and video, send messages and keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues.
• LinkedIn is a social networking site designed for the business community. Registered members can create networks of people they know and trust professionally.
• Pinterest is a social curation website for sharing and categorizing images found online. The main focus of Pinterest is visual, though it does call for brief descriptions of images. Clicking on an image will take a user to the original source. For example, clicking on a picture of a pair of shoes might redirect a user to a purchasing site; an image of blueberry pancakes might redirect to the recipe.
• Reddit is a social news website and forum where site members curate and promote stories. The site is composed of hundreds of sub-communities called subreddits. Each subreddit has a specific topic, such as technology, politics or music. Reddit site members, also known as “redditors,” submit content that members vote on. The goal is to elevate well-regarded stories to the top of the site’s main thread page.
• Twitter is a free microblogging service for registered members to broadcast short posts called tweets. Twitter members can broadcast tweets and follow other active users’ tweets using several platforms and devices.
• Wikipedia is a free, open content encyclopedia created through a collaborative community. Anyone registered on Wikipedia can create an article for publication; registration is not required to edit articles.

The Bottom Line

For better or worse, social media has reshaped our lives, capturing more than 4.7 billion users worldwide and counting. From a business perspective, it has also revolutionized commerce and seems likely to continue to do so.

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