A is for Angry Birds – The record breaking series of games from Rodio and
has been downloaded over 1 million times on various platforms. It has also been
known as the largest mobile app success the world has seen so far. The
characters have even be turned into hats and various other weird and wacky
merchandise!
B is for Blogs – A popular form on online communication with over 150 million blogs online right now (including this one!) with a new one created ever half a second!
C is for Comments – One of the simplest forms of interaction, comments makes conversation possible. And without conversation, social media is useless!
D is for Digg – The social bookmarking tool which allows people to share links to websites to vote “up” or “down” on them to give them an overall rating. Digg was recently sold for approx. $500,000 which may seem like a lot but is small in comparison to the $1 billion Facebook paid for Instagram.
E is for Etsy – An e-commerce website that allows people to sell their own home-made goods. It also has certain social networking features built-in to the website.
F is for Foursquare – A popular location-based check-in service where you can share your check-ins to Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook etc. from within the app. You can also unlock specials at some venues where you can get preferential treatment for “checking in”. In mid 2012, Foursquare had over 20 million users.
G is for Google+ – Some people say that Google+ was released slightly too late in comparison to the rest of the social media world but it does have some interesting features which differentiate themselves from competitors including the “Hangout” feature. Around 70% of its users are male.
H is for Hotmail – Pretty much everyone has had a hotmail account at some point in their lives and it is the world’s largest email provider with over 330 million users. You can also bet that a large percentage of these users have used hotmail to sign up to other social networks.
I is for Instagram – A photo-sharing app which allows you to apply filters to photographs in order to improve their appearance. When Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, it had over 50 million users.
J is for Journalism – Social media has completely changed traditional journalism, whether you’re reading breaking news stories on Twitter before it’s been released to the mainstream press or if you’re reading an article in the Financial Times about Facebook; social media and journalism now go hand in hand.
K is for Klout – This is a free service that measures a user’s influence across their favourite social networks from Facebook and Twitter to Foursquare and Flickr. Klout claims to measure the size of a person’s network, the content they create and how other people interact with that content among other things although its accuracy has been subject to criticism.
L is for LinkedIn – The social site for business professionals that allows people to network online with people they have worked with previously. You can even ask your contacts for introductions to people that they know. LinkedIn has over 150 million users.
M is for MySpace – The original social network. Once upon a time, MySpace was extremely popular amongst bands, musicians and their teenage following before Facebook became so widespread. Partly because users could use their own customized HTML codes to edit their profile pages to change the way it looked. Since then, MySpace has fallen from grace. Despite being co-owned by Justin Timberlake, its number of users has steadily declined in spite of several re-designs.
N is for Notifications – Without these, social networks would be much less social. Notifications are a standard feature across the majority of all online social platforms; alerting us when somebody has interacted with us by leaving a comment or sending a message.
O is for Open Graph – This is one of the reason’s of Facebook’s overwhelming success. Open Graph allows third-party applications and websites to integrate with Facebook (for example, Farmville games, pages feed etc.)
P is for Pinterest – The up and coming social network. Pinterest is slightly like Digg and other social networking websites, except with images. Pinterest allows you to “pin” images from external websites to your own virtual pin board to look at later or share with friends. Overall, it is far more popular amongst women than men and has seen a widespread adoption against paid bloggers. It currently has over 11 million monthly active users.
Q is for Questions – Curious for questions? Dozens of studies have proved that in general, to drum up the highest level of engagement from fans and followers on social networks is to include an image, a call to action and a question. Questions can also help you to gather feedback.
R is for Reddit – This is essentially the same concept as Digg, but a much more popular version. Like Digg, it is a form of social bookmarking and it hit over 2 billion page views and almost 35 million unique visitors back in December 2011.
S is for SoundCloud – A social networking websites for upcoming bands and musicians which allows them to upload and share their music content for free. Users can also follow each other and there is a “like” and “comment” system available. You can even embed a SoundCloud widget onto blogs and other websites and even Pinterest. SoundCloud has over 10 million users.
T is for Twitter – The extremely popular micro-blogging service that you’re probably already using if you’re reading this post. Part of Twitter’s popularity is that similarly to Facebook, you can create third-party applications and websites that allow you to use Twitter away from the official online website. Twitter currently has over 100 million active users.
U is for UStream – Which is a lot like YouTube but is designed specifically for live-streaming video content, users can save their live streams after they have finished recording and anyone with a web connection can tune in whilst they are broadcasting. UStream currently has over 2 million regularly active users.
V is for Vine – This is a smart-phone application, a bit like Instagram (but for video instead). It has been endorsed by many widely popular celebrities but its 6 second limit for video content has limited its success. Vine currently has around 15 million users.
W is for Wikipedia – The world’s most well-known wiki – A wiki is a website that fundamentally allows its users to edit, add and delete the text that the website consists of essentially making the web page a huge collaboration. Because of this, content can be unreliable and is why it’s use is frowned upon in most schools, colleges and universities. Wikipedia consists of over 8 billion words in over 19 million articles.
X is for Xanga – “The website only included because nothing else could be included for the letter “x” in the alphabet”. Xanga is a community website which allows you to set up your own blog, photo blog and social networking profile. During May 2012, Xanga’s was believed to be the 3,879th most visited website on the internet and that number has been declining ever since.
Y is for YouTube – The world’s largest video sharing website and the second largest search engine in the world behind Google (who actually own it!). Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube every month and a whopping 72 hours of video content are uploaded every single minute. 2013 saw the very first video hit over 1 billion “hits” or views which we all know was the infamous (love it or hate it) “Gangnam Style” by Korean megastar, Psy.
Z is for Zynga – The social game-makers that generate 15% of Facebook’s revenue. With 292 million monthly active users of their games which include Cityville, Mafia Wars, Hanging With Friends and Online Poker, Zynga has made over $1 billion in revenue in 2011 alone.
Post inspired by Nobull Communications; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZklv1CP31o
To view a much fuller link
on the A-Z of social media, please visit http://socialmedia.wikispaces.com/A-Z+of+social+media
or http://www.andymiah.net/2012/12/30/the-a-to-z-of-social-media-for-academics/
(e.g. A is for About.Me, H is for Hootsuite or Hash Tags, I is for Issuu, K is
for Keek, M is for Moonfruit, P is for Prezi, RSS is for Really Simple
Syndication etc., S is for Skype, Spotify or SurveyMonkey T is for Tumblr, W is
for Wordpress and much, much more. The social media empire is massive!)
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