Social Media and how it works ?

hi

Social media reared its beautiful, complex, evolving head into our worlds circa 2004, with the invention of Facebook. Yes, MySpace hung around before that, and maybe a few others, but Facebook took the medium from an online haven for teens to a global obsession.

now every small business, non-profit, and startup is being told to hop on board.

Usually without an explanation as to why, or how, they should go about it.

To use social media as a marketing tool -- an effective marketing tool -- it's best to understand how it works.

Social networks are the relationships that tie us together. Think about what happens when you meet someone new......

"Social network" has been around since the 1950s, but the meteoric rise of social-networking Web sites like MySpace, Facebook and Linkedin has turned a dusty sociological phrase into the hottest buzzword of the Internet age.....

A social network is a social structure that maps out the relationships between individuals.....

In the early 1930s, a self-published psychologist named Dr. Jacob Levi Moreno introduced the sociogram, the first formal attempt to map out the relationships within a group of people. Moreno's sociogram -- a cluster of individual points, or "nodes," connected by straight lines -- became a powerful tool for identifying social leaders, outsiders, and what he called the "sociometric star," the person to whom all others are connected.......

Social-networking sites "make invisible social networks visible" by allowing us to see (with pictures and links) who our friends are, who our friends' friends are, and who our friends' friends' friends are -- all in an easy-to-use interface.......

How popular are social-networking sites?

Seven of the top 20 most visited Web sites in the world are social-networking sites, such as MySpace or Friendster, or contain significant social-networking components like YouTube or Hi5......

Social-networking sites go main stream, By August 2006, more than two-thirds of MySpace visitors were over 25 years old, with more than 40 percent between the ages of 35 and 54. Now that non-university students can sign up for Facebook accounts, more than half of that site's members are out of college.....

Social-networking sites have gone global. In June 2007, Google's Orkut drew 49 percent of its visitors from Latin America (mostly Brazil) and 43 percent from the Asia-Pacific region.....

Social media is the collective of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration......

Facebook is a popular free social networking website that allows registered users to create profiles, upload photos and video, send messages and keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues.......

Twitter is a free microblogging service that allows registered members to broadcast short posts called tweets.....

Google+ is Google's social networking project, designed to replicate the way people interact offline more closely than is the case in other social networking services. The project’s slogan is “Real-life sharing rethought for the web......

Wikipedia is a free, open content online encyclopedia created through the collaborative effort of a community of users known as Wikipedians. Anyone registered on the site can create an article for publication; registration is not required to edit articles. Wikipedia was founded in January of 2001.......

LinkedIn is a social networking site designed specifically for the business community......

Reddit is a social news website and forum where stories are socially curated and promoted by site members.....

If your goal is to drive traffic to your website, then social media starts with creating content. You can’t attract new customers without generating content.

Pinterest is a part of social media website for sharing and categorizing images found online. Pinterest requires brief descriptions but the main focus of the site is visual. Clicking on an image will take you to the original source,

Social media analytics is the practice of gathering data from blogs and social media websites and analyzing that data to make business decisions.....

for the benefit of those of you living under a rock for the past half-dozen years — it is the integration of technology and social interaction. When you see social media, think blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.

Enterprise social networking allows a company to connect individuals who share similar business interests or activities. Internally......

Social media are interactive computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks.