Social Media 101

You can’t go anywhere these days without everyone talking about social media. It’s on the news. People’s fingers are going crazy on their cell phones. You even see people showing coupons on their phones to store staff at the cash register.

Some of you may be scratching your head and think you’re hearing a foreign language when people talk about tweeting, blogging and vlogging.

So what is social media anyway?

There are many different definitions of what social media is depending on whom you ask. The one thing we all agree on is that social media allows you to interact instantly with a large number of people socially in a virtual world.  People like to exchange recipes, share car tips, talk about diet and exercise, find new DIY projects, find a mate, and conduct business to name a few.

Whether you want to let your friends know what you’re doing, look for old classmates, tune-in with others and communicate live about your favorite TV show, check in with family or promote your business, social media can get the word out quickly.

There are many social networking platforms that people use to communicate or leave their mark on the web. These can be broken into different categories such as social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. There are video sharing sites such as YouTube and photo sharing sites such as Flickr and Photo bucket.

For blogs there are sites such as WordPress and Blogger. There are streaming sites such as Ustream, Justin.tv and webcastr.  There are also dating sites such as eharmony and match.com to name a couple. For those people who are interested in connecting with groups of people who have similar interests such as hiking, diving, computers, UFO’s, Ghost Hunting meetup.com is a great way to do that.

Facebook is currently the big daddy of all social media sites.  People post everything from what they are eating, famous or inspirational quotes, pictures, and invitations to sign-up for their lectures or classes and other events.

If there’s something you want to talk about, I’m sure you’ll find it. The nice thing about Twitter is that it looks for people to get right to the point because it limits your tweet to 140 characters.

Here are some interesting Internet statistics:

• $50 billion is the latest valuation for Facebook, which has reportedly seen new investments from Goldman Sachs and others (Source: Bloomberg).
• 73 percent of Americans read their local newspaper at least once per week, 78 percent claim to read ‘most or all’ of the local newspaper (Source: National Newspaper Association).
• 71 percent of U.S. web users have Facebook accounts (Source: iStrategyLabs).
• 66 percent of Americans cite television as their most widely used source for national and international news, down from 74 percent in 2008 and 82 percent in 2002 (Source: Pew Research).
• 65 percent of Internet users have paid to download or access some kind of online content from the Internet, with music, software and apps being the most popular (Source: Pew Internet).

• 41 percent of Americans say they get most of their news about national and international events from the Internet (Source: Pew Research).

Tweet you later!