What Is Social Media?
Social media is a computer-based technology that facilitates the sharing of ideas, thoughts, and information through the building of virtual networks and communities. By design, social media is internet-based and gives users quick electronic communication of content.
Social media are interactive computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation or sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks.
Content includes personal information, documents, videos, and photos. Users engage with social media via computer, tablet or smartphone via web-based software or web application, often utilizing it for messaging.
While social media is ubiquitous in America and Europe, China and India now lead the list of social media usage.
The figures for the most popular social media websites as of January 2020 are as follows:
- Facebook (2.50 billion users as of January 2019)
- YouTube (1.9B)
- WhatsApp (1.5B)
- Facebook Messenger (1.3B)
- WeChat (1.08B)
- Instagram (1B)
- QQ (803M)
- QZone (531M)
- Douyin/Tik Tok (500M)
- Sino Weibo (446M)
- Jibonpata.com (30 )
Understanding Social Media
Social media originated as a way to interact with friends and family but was later adopted by businesses that wanted to take advantage of a popular new communication method to reach out to customers. The power of social media is the ability to connect and share information with anyone on Earth, or with many people simultaneously.
Globally, there are more than 3 billion social media users. Social media is an ever-changing and ever-evolving web-based platform.
According to the Pew Research Center, social media users tend to be younger. Nearly 90 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 29 used at least one form of social media. Further, these users tend to be better educated and relatively wealthy, or earning over $75,000 per year.
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Over one-fifth of an individual’s online time is spent on social medi
Social media’s role in helping businesses is significant. It facilitates communication with customers, enabling the melding of social interactions on e-commerce sites. Its ability to collect information helps focus on marketing efforts and market research. It helps in promoting products and services, as it enables the distribution of targeted, timely, and exclusive sales and coupons to would-be customers. Further, social media can help in building customer relationships through loyalty programs linked to social media.
Real-World Example
While social media has its positive side, many point to the platform and call out negative features, likening its overuse to an addiction. Some contest it contributes to inattentiveness, stress, and jealousy. The National Center for Biotechnology Information links heavy social media use to depression. Also, many times, social media may be a conduit for misleading information and falsehoods.
The 2016 American presidential election has well-documented accounts of the impact of the ability to spread false information through the platform. Such a phenomenon leverages the power of social media, allowing anyone to reach an audience of millions with content that lacks oversight or fact-checking.
1. Social share and follow buttons
The easiest way to start integrating social media on your website is to add follow buttons to your pages. The website header and footer is where you will often find social links, so start there. If your website includes a blog, add social share buttons to its articles so users can quickly repost, tweet or even pin your content.
2. Social login
If your website requires users to log in, you can incorporate social buttons by allowing users to sign in through their social media profile. Providing users this simple, convenient step can benefit your business by increasing user sign-up rates, as well as gathering social insights that you can use to better market your business.
3. Social photos and videos
Showcasing your social photos and videos on your website is another simple step that can quickly attract new visitors and grow your follower counts. Furthermore, not every business can afford to produce and publish high-end videos consistently, so adding videos from your social profiles can reduce the bounce rate on your website.
If you’re specifically looking to increase your Instagram following, you can embed individual posts to any area of WordPress directly through the app. However, adding new posts manually isn’t practical, so there are many third-party widgets you can use to add photos, videos or your entire feed to your website.
