9781422270684

This training method—unlike college—is free, and you will earn a salary while you learn. What Is Social Media? It’s likely that you’re familiar with social media, but some people have never used it. Let’s take a moment to define it. Social media is an internet-based form of communication that people use to have conversations; share opinions and fact-based information, photos, videos, podcasts, and blog posts; promote themselves or the work of an organization; advocate for causes; and sell products and services. Marketing professors Michael Haenlein and Andreas Kaplan identified the following types of social media in their article in Business Horizons , “Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media.” Keep in mind that some social media sites can be listed in more than one category, other experts have created larger groupings of social media types, not everyone agrees about what is and what is not social media, and some social media sites have fallen out of favor and are no longer used. • Blogs and microblogs: e.g., Twitter, WordPress, Blogger • Collaborative projects: e.g., Wikipedia, Google Docs/Sheets • Content communities: e.g., YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr • Social-networking sites: e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace • Virtual game worlds: e.g., World of Warcraft and Adventure Academy for Kids Ages 8–13 • Virtual social worlds: e.g., SecondLife, The Sims, The Sandbox In recent years, social media has become immensely popular. In 2005, only 5 percent of American adults reported using at least one social media platform, according to the Pew Research Center, which today reports that 72 percent of the American public uses some type of social media. In 2021, more than 4.26 billion people worldwide used

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Getting Started: Careers in Social Media and the Web