What Exactly is Social Networking and Social Media?

For years, the Internet was an unsocial place. People used it for buying products with out talking to companies and people would have email accounts in which they’d wait 5 days for their friend to reply to them. This has all changed however.

Suddenly we’ve entered a massive Online Social Revolution. We’re keeping in touch with friends which aren’t even in our close group of acquaintances. We’re all ‘Poking’ one another on Facebook, we’re Tweeting daily on Twitter and our life stories are all available on our Blog.

So what exactly is Social Media and Social Networking? Simple, it’s us being Social behind closed doors. It’s us voicing our opinions regardless of where we are in the world. Better yet, it’s us deciding what’s hot and what’s not.

A classic example of this is MySpace. In a nutshell, Record Labels used to find artists, market them and then push them on to the end consumer. MySpace changed this however, suddenly the public were finding the artists directly, cutting out the need to be told what we’d listen to. The thing however that made it really great was that we were directly involved in promoting and sourcing the artists. We knew more about them then any label would let us know. Whether it’d be us seeing pictures of them out at the weekend or seeing that there current status indicates that they are sick and looking forward to going home. The briefness and ‘straight to the point’ networking meant we were in touch, like never before.

So what is Social Networking? It’s the public socialising with one another like never before. Suddenly we have a world wide audience and I can assure you that at least 1% of that figure wants to hear what you have to say and support you.

To find out more, why not sign up and join a social networking site? Here’s a couple of the more popular sites:

• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Digg
• Facebook
• Stumbleupon
• MySpace
• Twitter