Chapter 4. Social Media and Your Targeted Audience
As millions of people use the Web for conducting detailed research on products and services, getting involved in political campaigns, joining music and film fan clubs, reviewing products, and discussing hobbies and passions, they congregate in all kinds of online places. The technologies and tools, which many people now refer to collectively as "social media," all include ways for users to express their opinions online:
Social Networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace help people cultivate a community of friends and share information.
Blogs, personal web sites written by somebody who is passionate about a topic, provide a means to share that passion with the world and to foster an active community of readers who provide comments on the author's posts.
Video and photo sharing sites like YouTube, Flickr, and Vimeo greatly simplify the process of sharing and commenting on photos and videos.
Chat rooms and message boards serve as online meeting places where people meet and discuss topics of interest, with the main feature being that anyone can start a discussion thread.
Listservs, similar to chat rooms, send messages out by email to a collection of registered members.
Wikis are web sites that anybody can edit and update.
Social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious allow users to suggest content to others and "vote" on what is interesting.
What Is Social Media, Anyway?
Since "social media" is such an important concept ...
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