Social media includes user-generated, online, communication devices that allow participants to share a wide-range of unregulated content. Because users are both authors and audience members, social media creates a true democracy where any participant can be a newsmaker and information collector. Social media often involves and integrates different technology including text, images, video and audio.
Here is a useful breakdown of social media sites from http://searchengineland.com/how-search-like-social-media-16325
Social News Sites (such as Digg, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz)
Social Bookmarking Sites (such as Delicious, StumbleUpon)
Social Networking (such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn)
Social Knowledge (such as Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers)
Social Sharing (such as YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Urban Spoon, Yelp)
These websites allow users to create personal profiles at no cost.
