UCNISS/Sport Social Media Academy/Using social media

There are a lot of options when it comes to using social media. What options you chose will really depend on your purpose, market and audience location. In general, social media falls into several broad general categories:

• Blogging;
• Chat;
• Geolocation and checkins;
• Images and video;
• Mailing lists, message boards, discussion sites and groups;
• Microblogging;
• Question and answer sites; and
• Wikis.

Many social network sites include several aspects of these. MySpace has groups, blogging and video & image hosting. Facebook has blogging, chat, microblogging, geolocation, groups, and question and answer component. Bebo has groups, and image and video hosting. Some sites have only one aspect. Twitter, Yammer, identi.ca are all microblogging sites. Foursquare and Gowalla are geolocation services. Yahoo!Answers and Quora are question and answer sites. LiveJournal, Blogger and WordPress are blogging sites. YouTube and Vimeo are both video hosting sites. Wikipedia, Wikia, AboutUs and wikiHow are all wikis.

Different social networks cater to different demographic groups and different needs. They all have their own unique set of metrics that can help explain how successful you were on that site.