Social networks
Social networks are by far the most well-known manifestation of social media. With well-known examples such as Hyves , Facebook and Google Plus . Social networks are all about forming and maintaining relationships. Maintaining contact with family, friends, acquaintances, former classmates, colleagues, etc. Personal relationships between people are central. Social networks are therefore an online extension of your offline life. We keep each other informed of new events in our lives via status updates. At the same time, they enable us to display what keeps us busy. For brands, social networks are a means to get in touch with fans. Usually by starting a fan page.
Communities
In communities, the connection is not so much in the personal relationship (although that can arise), but more in a shared interest, passion or subject. For example, LinkedIn offers the possibility to create groups around your field of expertise, a training or employer. Members have in common that they are all concerned with the subject or the organization in question. Pregnant women find each other on the prenatal community , where they can exchange experiences. Communities have also emerged around many medical issues. For example, patients who want to know more about their condition and seek support from fellow sufferers. But a shared passion such as the love for a certain football club is also an excellent breeding ground for the creation of communities, such as the Ajax Network .
File sharing
This type of social media allows people to exchange and share multimedia files – such as photos, videos, etc. – with a large audience. Examples include photo sites, video sites, podcasts, and presentation sharing sites.
Photo sites
On photo sites, amateur photographers and/or professionals place their…photos (that was not a cliffhanger). Photos are usually placed in 'albums'. The databases of such sites are searchable, because tags and descriptions are added to photos. The best-known example of such a site is Flickr . On this site you can upload photos, view them and share them via other social media (such as Twitter and Facebook).
Other photo sharing sites include Google's Picassa and Instagram for mobile applications, about which Tomas Dankers wrote an article earlier this year here on Frankwatching.
Video sites
YouTube is one of the most visited websites in the world. Not surprising when you consider that the site is the #1 platform for sharing and watching videos. Besides YouTube, there are many other sites where you can watch videos, but none come close to YouTube's enormous user base. The simple proposition of these sites: if you can film it, you can post it online. Which mainly leads to a huge number of fun, funny, but also embarrassing videos.
Companies use video mainly to demonstrate their products or services or to show a view of an event they have organized. The number of views for these business videos is in most cases not very high. Only by offering something very special you can attract viewers. Remember, 35 hours of new footage is uploaded to YouTube every hour.
The Will It Blend videos from Blendtec certainly qualify. Thanks to the humorous videos in which the most diverse objects were ground to pulp in a blender, the company managed to sell millions of blenders israel phone number list Old Spice is another brand that has managed to achieve enormous exposure with, among other things, the 'The Man You're Man Can Smell Like' campaign. The videos that are part of this have been viewed tens of millions of times and sales of Old Spice went through the roof. These examples show that you can achieve business success via YouTube with an original approach. Unfortunately, most companies only post dusty commercials and are surprised by the fact that they do not go viral. To round off this section on video sites, below is a YouTube video about social media.
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Presentations
What can be done with photos and videos can also be done with presentations, and so SlideShare was founded. The site where you can upload and view PowerPoint presentations. These presentations can then also be embedded on other platforms, such as weblogs and social networks. 50 million people use SlideShare every month. No small beer. If you are a company that wants to share its knowledge or vision on a certain subject, SlideShare is a great platform to do so. By posting high-quality content, you can be seen as an authority in your field over time. This applies to both companies and individuals.
Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking sites such as Delicious allow users to save bookmarks online and share them with others. By adding tags, the bookmarks become searchable. The goal is to be able to find interesting pages/content and/or to inform others about it. The saved bookmarks are searchable, which creates functionality that is somewhat comparable to that of a search engine. The big difference is that with a search engine, algorithms identify what a certain page is about, while with a social bookmarking site this is done by the users. In recent years, the use of these types of services has been declining, mainly because people share content more often via social networks and microblogs.