Generally, social media sharing web most of the following sites:
- some of the content is generated by users (visitors) from the site rather than the publisher;
- Site users can interact;
- we can know what content comes from which user.
Anglophone authors have even stuck a phrase imaged this site talking about the read / write web (web read / write), as opposed to the first generation of web sites where visitors could only read what was released without being able to make its own contribution.
The term "Web 2.0" usually refers to web enrolling in the current read / write web sites. By extension, there has emerged the term "education 2.0" to describe training practices using social media. However, there is no definition that is acceptable to everyone around "Web 2.0", "education 2.0", "social web" and "social media". It is recommended to pay special attention to the nuances that every author wants to give these expressions when we get information on the subject.
Web 2.0 sites are participatory websites where the user is active in the construction of the site or the surrounding community. Each user is potentially both a producer and a consumer of content, in varying proportions.
Of course, there are social media users who consume more than they produce, or only consume. In a number of social media, much of the social activity is to review the content prepared by other users, or even to comment on the comments others have left, leading to conversations and possibly training communities. We need only think of YouTube or blogs, for example, to find that the number of users who consume published content is much higher than the number of users who comment on the content, which is itself much higher the number of users who initially publish content.
Some examples of social media
We have prepared a list of some examples of popular social media. The list is not exhaustive, far from it. Social media included in this list have almost all competitors, but we have chosen to present only the dominant player in each niche: Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Flickr, Delicious, blogs, Twitter and wikis. Learn which social site would be best for your marketing efforts.
Facebook
This is possibly the most popular social media. This site allows users to create a web profile where they can share their interests, photos, messages and activities. Users will réseautent by inviting them to become "Facebook friends." Once a Facebook friend request is accepted, friends will receive notifications of the latest changes to their Facebook pages: new photos added, comments on what is happening in their lives, links to other sites or content that they want to share in their network, etc. It is possible to create groups and special pages called fan pages, which allow to exceed the limit of 5,000 friends personal pages. The main use of Facebook revolves around the life of: using Facebook to communicate with his personal network his feelings, what happens in our lives, what caught our attention. We can also send invitations to events. Facebook is very popular among students, who consult several times a day to update their page and see what their friends have said.
LinkedIn
It is a professional online network. A bit like Facebook, LinkedIn is oriented around the individual profile that you create on the site. Unlike Facebook, which is instead used for personal, LinkedIn profile is oriented around working life. It reproduces our resume and our professional references. And invites colleagues, bosses and other current and former to join our professional network and possibly to write recommendations to be associated with our business partners profile. LinkedIn thus serves primarily business networking and employment. It is possible to create groups to facilitate communication between people who share common interests or affiliations. LinkedIn is popular especially among professionals and managers. The senior undergraduate and graduate students may be interested to their employability.
YouTube
It is a site for sharing videos. Users can watch videos there, integrate these videos even other websites, create lists of favorite videos, comment on existing videos, etc. [more ...] Some organizations and several artists have their "channel" where they make available promotional videos, training videos or video clips. Each user can submit their own videos.
Flickr
This is a photo sharing site, and to a lesser extent, illustrations. Photos posted on Flickr are usually labeled with keywords, which makes it easy to find photos on the same subject throughout the site. One can also add comments under the photos published or add annotations directly on photos. It is easy to browse the collection of photos of a person where you can enjoy production. Many amateur photographers are talented make available photos for which they explicitly grant rights of use without charge.
Delicious
This is a site for sharing web bookmarks. Whenever you add a bookmark to Delicious, you can associate multiple keywords, comments, and even send it to other users. Organization of bookmarks is as easy as on the browser, since we do not have to create hierarchical categorization and sub-categories: simply combine as many keywords that are deemed necessary to each of our bookmarks so you can find easily when it is needed. When saving a bookmark, Delicious automatically suggests popular keywords that other users have associated the same page. Everyone is free to use or not use these suggestions and add your own keywords. Thanks to keywords, there is way to do a global search on the entire site Delicious to find the most popular pages associated with the keywords of interest. In addition, at any time, the home page displays the Delicious popular pages recently recorded by multiple users and keywords that are most commonly associated.
Delicious also serves as a single repository of bookmarks that are shared between all our computers and other mobile devices that access the web (mobile phones, etc.).
In addition to sharing between our own computers, we can share bookmarks in a very organized with other site visitors way. You can create collections of bookmarks according to certain topics and make them public to share with other users who have interests in common with us. We can also visit the public collections created by other users.
For a fuller introduction, see this original and very well done video that explains how Delicious (English, 3 min 22 with button to change the narrative in French): Social bookmarking in plain English.
Blogs
These are personal sites where an author writes notes on matters of public concern and where readers can leave comments on each article. Blogs have been very popular with certain technologies to subscribe to a site and receive alerts when new notes are published, without having to visit the site regularly to check if there is new . The comments allow people to form a community where they share their ideas on the topics covered in the blog. Sometimes another blogger responds to a ticket with an article on his own blog, it will show in the comments of the ticket which he replies. Topics discussed on blogs are varied, the taste of every blogger.
Twitter
This is a microblogging site where you publish small notes with a maximum length of 140 characters. Tickets are called tweets (tweets). Each user subscribes to the twitter stream of people he finds interesting tweets - they say it "follows" (follow) a person - and then receive tweets from all users tracked as that they are published throughout the day. Twitter is widely used to spontaneously share links to other sites and to comment on current events in general or that of life: response to new recently published commentary live on a TV show, a link to site interest, thinking that tops the gazouilleur, etc. Over time, various conventions have emerged among users of Twitter to facilitate communication, such as a keyword system called the hashtag (a keyword preceded by a hash mark, for example, # education2.0), which allows to know that people that say we do not follow a subject. Another convention is retweeting, where we republish our own network to a tweet sent by someone you follow, with attribution to the original tweet author. The short format of 140 characters forces the conciseness and creativity. There are specialized applications that allow you to use Twitter without having to visit the Twitter website directly, as we call Twitter clients. For more information, visit this article Infobourg and procedure prepared by the Regional Centre for Strategic Alsace before.
As you can see there are so many that some sort of scheduler would be a great idea. Try Mass Planner, the best Facebook Scheduling software around!
Wikis
These are sites of documentation or reference the drafting is done collaboratively by a group of people. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written by thousands of users in their free time. Wikis allow each user to add items or modify existing ones. You can view the history of changes to know by whom they were made and when. We can see older versions of articles. Some wikis even have a discussion page associated with each article so that contributors can discuss the changes made or planned for this article (in the case of Wikipedia) between them. Wikis are widely used for the documentation of concepts, systems and procedures and update continuously by a team. In education, many teachers use them to propose their collaborative student learning activities. For a short original and very well done, which explains in more depth the operation of video wikis, see Wikis, in Plain English (3 min 34, in English, with button to change the narrative in French).