Characteristics Of Social Media

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According to Linda Peters (1998), the “Web” presents a fundamentally different environment – both as a medium and as a market – from traditional communication channels perspective. It creates the Marketspace – a virtual realm where products and services exist as digital information and can be delivered through information-based channels (Rayport and Svikola, 1994). The companies and consumers quickly adopted the new concept of the new interactive world for their own benefits. These interactive channels allowed companies to reach new markets or have a greater influence in the existing one’s (i.e. example media companies transferred their newspapers in order to reach new audiences) and the consumers had an opportunity to save time and money by …show more content…

Social media The real power of people can be noticed in the new revolutionized media channel – social media. According to Mayfield (2008) social media is best understood as a group of new kinds of online media, which share most or all of the following characteristics: Participation & Engagement: Social media inspires contributions and feedback from everyone who is interested. It blurs the line between media and audience. Openness: Most social media services are open to feedback and participation. They encourage voting, comments and the sharing of information. There are rarely any barriers to accessing and making use of content – password-protected content is frowned on. Conversation: whereas traditional media is about „broadcast‟ (content transmitted or distributed to an audience) social media is better seen as a two-way conversation. Community: social media allows communities to form quickly and communicate effectively. Communities share common interests, such as a love of photography, a political issue or a favorite TV show. Connectedness: Most kinds of social media thrive on their connectedness, making use of links to other sites, resources and …show more content…

Haven (2008) suggests that social media key elements are not entirely new as features of sharing, connecting, opining, broadcasting and creating has been long in our lives, but there are several characteristics of new technologies and behaviors that set them apart from the past: Reach — Historically, audiences for the common person have been limited: a tribe, family, friends, neighbors, or the local community. Today's technologies provide scale and enable anyone to reach a global audience. Accessibility — The means of production for most media used to lie in the hands of enterprises with unlimited resources (financial or human). Today's technologies for media creation are available to anyone at little or no

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