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5. Forums
6. Content Communities
7. Microblogging
Tuten and Solomon (2015) suggested four classification, called "zones of social media",
including social community, social publishing, social entertainment and social commerce.
In this study, we will focus on Mayfield (2008) criterion to analyze the platforms.
Social Networks
Social networks are not only innovative, but also in terms of cost of communication. Social
networks or social networking sites SNS allow people to create their personal webpages and
then connect and interact with family, friends for the purpose of sharing “news and views”.
Nowadays, consumers have accessibility to have many different sources of information and
experiences, which have been contributed on SNS by other customers’ information and
recommendations (Senecal & Nantel, 2004). At the time of writing this article, the biggest
social networks are Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin and Instagram. The biggest change
in SNS come when Facebook born in 2004, based on 1 billion active users, Facebook would
be third largest country in this world.
Blogs
Blogs have been around for more than a decade. Blogs are online websites, maintained by
individual or groups to connect online debate. Blogger control the blog and blog's content.
The entries are arranged chronologically backwards (the newest is always the first on the
page), and most blogs allow the readers to post comments right below the published article
without any strict rules, which help consumers to get to know better about desire products
or services. Since 1998, weblogs or ‘blogs’ have gained increasing notice in the online
community because even people without any programming experience can also easily
develop and publish their personal websites (Blood, 2002).
Wikis
Wikis are websites that generally allows people to add, modify or delete contents
collaboratively with others (Mayfield, 2008).Wikis can be about anything and everything.
Usually a wiki is supported by a database that keeps track of all changes, it's fair game to
correct any inaccuracies if consumer found. It is not uncommon to see any entry updated
several times per day. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia founded in
2001, which has 70000 active contributors, 70 million articles in 290 languages (Wikipedia,
2015). In fact, one of the pillars of the community is "all Wikipedia articles must be written
from a neutral point of view, representing views fairly and without bias"[27].
Podcast
According to Merriam-webster dictionary a podcast is "a program (as of music or talk) made
available in digital format for automatic download over the Internet”, podcast can listened
to or viewed at a later stage with some subscription. Although some podcasts are one-time
productions, many podcasts are "serial", new episodes are produced each day, week, or
month. Apple’s iTunes is the most widely used podcast platform around the world. The
podcast can be either listened or downloaded on computers and on mobile devices trough
iTunes application. According to Nigam 2014, there are 800 million iTunes accounts.
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