What is your definition of social media?Originally Posted by John Sebetsi
Definition of social media: forms of electronic communication (as Web sites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (as videos)
The Wikipedia entry on Classification of social media gives a bit more insight.
Social media technologies take on many different forms including magazines, Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, social networks, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking. Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, music-sharing, crowdsourcing and voice over IP, to name a few. Many of these services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms. By applying a set of theories in the field of media research (social presence, media richness) and social processes (self-presentation, self-disclosure) Kaplan and Haenlein created a classification scheme in their Business Horizons (2010) article, with six different types of social media: collaborative projects (for example, Wikipedia), blogs and microblogs (for example, Twitter), content communities (for example, YouTube and DailyMotion), social networking sites (for example, Facebook), virtual game worlds (e.g., World of Warcraft), and virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life). However, the boundaries between the different types have been increasingly blurred. For example, Shi, Rui and Whinston (2013) argues that Twitter, as a combination of broadcasting service and social network, is better to be classified as a "social broadcasting technology.
As HR Solutions mentions, quality forum content certainly does very well on organic search.
And as Adrian mentions, forum content tends to give communication more topic-related structure than social network platforms tend to.
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