15 Social Media Categories

Another innate human characteristic is to put items in categories; the more items there are, the more there is a need to organize them. You can see my attempt to categorize the entire world of social media in Table 1.1. This was not an easy feat, but I think you will agree it works.

Table 1.1 The 15 Social Media Categories

Category Title Tactics and Tools Chapters
Social Networking Chapter 2
Photo Sharing Chapter 8
Audio Chapters 9 and 10
Video Chapters 11 and 12
Microblogging Chapter 13
Livecasting Chapter 14
Virtual Worlds Chapter 15
Gaming Chapter 16
RSS and Aggregators Chapter 17
Search Chapters 18 and 19
Mobile Chapter 20
Interpersonal Chapter 21

Social Networking

Social networking is as old as humans have been around. Just as in nearly every other species, humans have an instinctual need to be with, communicate with, and share thoughts, ideas, and feelings about their daily lives. Only the tools with which we communicate have changed over the millennia.

This category discusses the many platforms we use today in social media to connect, share, educate, interact, and build trust.

Photo Sharing

Napoleon Bonaparte is sometimes credited with having expressed the idea that “A picture is worth a thousand words,” and if that’s true, then Flickr’s photographs are worth, well 4,000,000,000 × 1,000 . . . way too many zeros for me! Flickr now houses more than 4 billion photographs, and that doesn’t count Picasa, SmugMug, PhotoSwarm, ...

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