My previous article focused on 16 Reasons to Use Social Media for networking and promoting your business. This article will provide information on social media categories and their basic functions.

There are a multitude of sites out there, which could never be covered in a single article, but they all basically fall into three major categories where you can establish a profile and begin the process of building your online identity and brand.

Communication

Interactive web sites, blogs and micro-blogging sites: These are places where content is updated regularly on specific topics. The content may come in the form of written text (most popular), graphics and charts, audio or video. You will often encounter a combination of any or all of these on a single site.

The beauty here is that these sites provide for interaction and communication with the content producer, something that was always missing from static web sites. Examples of these are blogs operating on platforms like Wordpress and Blogger and micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Tumblr.

Collaboration

Social news and social bookmarking: These make great tools for content consumers to search, rate, organize and bookmark web pages that you determine have a real value with regard to the topic covered. After tagging the various sites with keywords, they can easily be shared with others who are interested in the same type or similar content.

The goal is to rate these pages and articles and establish a ranking based on the number of times the content has been submitted, which establishes it’s popularity. It’s a voting process conducted by other users of the internet. Some examples of these sites are Delicious, Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon.

Wikis: A Wiki is a website that allows for the easy creation and editing of interlinked content and is often used to create collaborative web sites. Wikipedia is the most popular of all in this category. Anyone with access to these sites can modify and organize the web page content in a collaborative manner.

Multimedia

Audio, video and photographic: By far the most entertaining of the group, in my opinion. As the word implies, this is simply multiple forms of content in a single location or site. YouTube, Flickr and Pandora are examples of sites that share video, photos and music respectively.

Advancements in new media technologies will continue to enhance the multimedia experience where content is shared.

Conclusion

Most social media and social networking will involve the categories explained above. So there you have it, the opportunity to be involved with the various outlets where content is shared and consumed by today’s internet users.

To build your successful brand you will need to be involved and have a presence in many of these places.

In the next article I will cover how to get started with social media and some of the tools that will make the task both fun and easy.

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