Social Media vs. Social Networking
(Is there really a difference?)
Social media is the term used to describe the various media that people use to communicate online in a social way such as blogs, wikis, video and photo sharing. One compartment of social media is social networking. Social networking, in short, is how people interact with each other online. It starts as soon as someone joins that online community and interacts with them online. Some of the most common social networking sites include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace (wow talk about an old blog) and Flicker (old again).
Social networking sites are all about connecting people. These sites make it easy for people to create a profile about themselves. Using their profiles they can form a network that combines their offline friends and new online friends.
According to comScore, the social networking category of websites had nearly 140 million visitors in the U.S. in early 2009 (www.comscore.com). With Facebook recently reaching 500 million users it is becoming vitally important to be an active person/company apart of social networking. While these numbers are remarkable, we can easily lose track of what this means. You need to consider these numbers as the potential people who can spread your ideas and tell your stories. The people who are apart of these like-minded social networking sites are the people who you want to share your business.
They are the ones that are going to decide whether or not they are going to buy from you. So here’s the question – What are you waiting for? Get involved and get your business apart of the online community.
