The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, 3rd Edition

What You Need to Know

As you might suspect, this chapter’s format needs to be a little different. A section like Back to the Beginning really isn’t appropriate. Instead, this chapter provides you with some facts about the features and benefits based on a few hand-selected, highlighted companies, and introduces you to some extraordinary tools in the social media ecosphere. You will also see that many of these selected companies and services—although listed in a particular section—can be used in a variety of ways, and a good number of the applications actually fit into more than one category. With that, let’s dive in to our three categories.

Messaging Applications

Messaging was one of the first social communication applications, usually built around a chat metaphor through which people connected one to one with “buddies” or coworkers in a list. Conversations are opened by clicking on a name in your list, and typing a message to that person. As these tools have become extremely popular, often with millions of users, features have expanded to provide better integration with e-mail and applications such as Facebook, audio and video chat capability, and more ideas—but the core of these applications remains as a quick way to message another person directly, usually for free.

AOL Instant Messenger: AOL Instant Messenger (AIM, www.AIM.com; see Figure 21.1)

FIGURE 21.1 AOL Instant Messenger

is a free online service that lets you communicate in real time. Using the AIM Buddy List window ...