Social Media

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What Does Social Media Mean?

Social media is a catch-all term for a variety of internet applications that allow users to create content and interact with each other. This interaction can take many forms, but some common types include:

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  • Sharing links to interesting content produced by third parties
  • Public updates to a profile, including information on current activities and even location data
  • Sharing photos, videos and posts
  • Commenting on the photos, posts, updates, videos and links shared by others

Techopedia Explains Social Media

Social media is perceived as a Web 2.0 development, which is to say that it is founded on the concept of a user-driven, interactive web. Blogs, message boards and chat rooms provide an experience that could be described as social media, but the term is more strongly identified with sites like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn, and so on. Like many buzzwords, the meaning of social media is a moving target that gets shifted around according to what the person using it wants it to mean.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.