Introduction
In today’s world, the technological advancement that has been experienced within the last few decades has transformed the mode of communication in magnificent ways. The digital technology both in the gadgets used today as well as the web-based communication platforms has supported communication across the world with the touch of a button. Among various modern communication platforms, social media have emerged as one of the most efficient and popular model of sharing information across the world.
Social media networks individuals, companies as well as governments making all aspects of human life and governance easily shared cross the globe (Acred, 2015, 56). Social media takes various forms such as; business networks, blogs, enterprise social networks, photo sharing, online forums, social gaming, and video sharing such as YouTube. This report takes an overview of three types of social media websites as an analysis of their fundamental differences in terms of their objectives and their target users.
User-generated websites
These are websites whose contents are generated by those people using them. These websites basically focuses on sharing of information among the users. Some of the examples of user generated websites are YouTube, Twitter, and Wikipedia among others (Eastin, 2011, 72). The contents found in these websites especially videos are uploaded users by creating accounts. One major distinction of such websites is that they are available to any user regardless of some of the common considerations made by other websites.
Q&A websites
The second type of website is community Q&A websites. These are websites mainly designed for learning purposes only. The internet is flooded by these websites. Users of such websites visit in order to search for information about something they are interested in for example if a person wants to know how to prepare a Spanish omelet, they access one of these Q&A websites that explains how it’s done. Some of the common examples of such websites are Yahoo Answers, Qoura, formspring and beepl among others. In these websites the users are not necessarily able to share information among themselves like in user generated websites. These websites are very important especially to students and researches since they have made gathering of information which was very difficult before (Raban, 2009, 31).
Community participation websites
Finally there is the community participation websites. These websites are based on creating interactions from various community members about a certain topic or idea. A virtual community is created on these websites representing the people participating. The interactions in these websites are based on specific agendas such as political, social problem or health issues among others (Cudworth, 2014, 95). Some of examples of such websites are blogs, online forums and wikis. However some of the community participation websites target participation of specific section of the society.
That is the developers focus on engaging certain community members into their discussions for example, AsianAvenue which focuses on networking of the Asian American community and Advogato used by software developers. In websites, other users would not fit in such websites because the issues discussed in those websites are beyond their interests.
Conclusion
Every now and then new ways of communicating are introduced but digital communicating has created an enormous opportunity for better communication models. Social media over the years have gained great popularity in the communication world. These are among a wide spectrum of websites found in the internet and their fundamental objective is communication. However, the differences in these websites are based on the target users and the information shared through such websites. Organizations all over the world are utilizing such websites in marketing their goods and services therefore creating a great opportunity for growth.
Bibliography
Acred, C. (2015). Social media. Cambridge: Independence Educational Publishers.
Eastin, M. S., Daugherty, T., and Burns, N. M. (2011). Handbook of research on digital media and advertising: user generated content consumption. Hershey, PA, Information Science Reference.
Raban, D. R. (2009). Self-presentation and the value of information in Q&A websites. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 60, 2465-2473.
Cudworth, A. L. (2014). Virtual world design. Florida: CRC Press.
