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What is Social Media Directory?

To understand the concept of Social Media Directory, one must first have knowledge of social media. Social media, though considered to be in an infant stage, has rapidly evolved and has gained a significant popularity around the globe. The main reason for its skyrocketing popularity is its ease of connectivity to the world in order to form relationships for personal, political and business use. Social media is an online means in order to create an effective communication using highly accessible technologies. In a social media people can share news, information and content to others via the internet.
A social media directory is a managed directory of social media. The usage of social media has led to an evolution even in the websites. Websites now days contain a separate section for social media directory. In that section different types of social media categories that are related to the website are placed in the directory from where any user can acquire information. The social media directory has direct links to various social media related to the issues regarding the website itself.

Categories of Social Media

Fig: Sub-categories of social media
Source: http://www.stratiusgroup.com/social-media/spheres.html

Social media is broadly subcategorized into five areas. They are networking, publishing, linking, niche and interactive. There are various services that are found on the internet which uses either one or more of the sub-categories in order to form a service package/directory.
Networking: Social networking is the most common form of social media. In social networking, people from all around the world and enjoying the internet facility meet one another virtually and communicate. There are many websites available on the internet that serves as social networking sites. These sites allow people to connect for various reasons, such as friendship, careers, dating and resources. Examples: Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Meetup

Publishing: Social publishing includes the large subcategory of blogging, media sites for sharing video or photos and reference sites featuring community generated knowledge. Examples: Youtube, Flickr, Last.fm, Wikipedia, Squidoo
Linking: Social linking includes the sharing of links to articles and other content generally for promotion. The websites providing such services are often called “social book marking” sites. Examples: Mixx, Reddit, StumbleUpon, HubDub, Newsvine

Interactive: Social interaction includes virtual gaming and crowdsourcing networks. Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. The focus of these networks is on dynamic interaction with others. The interactive portion can be a virtual 3D world, large gaming environments, or communities where users work together to solve problems and create goods and services. Examples: Second Life, NameThis, Webkinz, Mosio, Threadless

Niche: Niche is the micro-focused network that can fall within one or many of the five social media types. Niche networks will begin to create much more valuable hyper-local online community content. But geography is just one section of niche. Sites form around very unique interests, from TV shows to sports and beyond. Examples: Kirtsy, Ning, My Church, Passport Stamp

Benefits of Social Media and Social Media Directory
• Social media have the capability to reach a significantly large number of audiences through the wide networks.
• Social network can reach any part of the world where there is internet service.
• Social networks are available to anyone at very low cost.
• Social networks can have recent news updates with lesser time lag compared to traditional media.
• Social media directory helps access the desired information to a pertinent subject directly.

Image Source:

http://mobasoft.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/social-media-marketing.jpg