Table 1.
Types of Social Media, Examples, and Definitions
| Types of social media | Definitions | Example Platforms |
|---|---|---|
| Social networking sites | ‘Web-based services that allow individuals to 1) construct a public or semi-public profile with a bounded system, 2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and 3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.’[12] | Facebook |
| Bookmarking | ‘Provide a mix of both direct (intentional navigational advice as well as indirect (inferred) advice based on collective public behavior. By definition these social bookmarking systems provide “social filtering” on resources from the web and intranet. The act of bookmarking indicates that one is interested in a given resource. At the same time, tags provide semantic information about how the resource can be viewed.’[42] | StumbleUpon |
| Microblogging | ‘Services that focus on short updates that are pushed out to anyone subscribed to receive the updates.’[18] | Twitter Tumblr |
| Blogs and forums | ‘Online forums allow members to hold conversations by providing messages. Blog comments are similar except they are attached to blogs and usually the discussion centers around the topic of the blog post.’ [18] | WordPress Blogger |
| Media sharing (primary function) | ‘Services that allow you to upload and share various media such as pictures and video. Most services have additional features such as profiles, commenting, etc.’[18] | Instagram YouTube |
| Social news | “Services that allow people to post various news items or links to outside articles and then allows it’s users to “wove” on the items. The voting the is core social aspect as the items that get the most votes are displayed most prominently. The community decides which news item gets seen by more people.’[18] | Reddit Digg |
| Collaborative authoring | ‘Web-based services that enable users to create content and allow anyone with access to modify, edit, or review that content.’[43] | GoogleDocs Wikipedia Dropbox |
| Web-conferencing | ‘Web-conferencing may be used as an umbrella term for various types of online collaborative services including web-seminars (“webinars”), webcasts, and peer-level webmeetings[44, 15] | Skype Google Hangout |
| Scheduling and meeting | Web based services enabling group-based event decisions[45] [46] | Doodle, Microsoft Outlook |
| Geo-location based | Services that allow its users to connect and exchange messages based on their location. Most platforms have this, but some are distinctly created for this purpose. | Foursquare Tinder |