Hello, you're probably familiar with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, or YouTube. These are all popular examples of social media. In this video, we're going to answer the question, what is social media? To answer this question, let's define social media and then look at its important characteristics. User-created content, two-way communication, and an online social network. We can start with the definition. Social Media is the websites and applications, or apps, that allow you to create and share media messages with other people. These sites, or apps, allow users to create content, which is the pictures, text or video that make up a media message. What makes this media social is that users can then publish their own content so it can be shared with other people. Now, that we have basic understanding of what social media is, let's look at its characteristics in more detail and see how they're different from traditional media. One of the most important characteristics of social media and maybe the biggest difference compared to traditional media is the ability to publish user created content. All of the text and picture and video messages in social media are created by the users. Remember, in traditional media content is created by big media companies or the government instead of by users. Another important characteristic of social media is Two-Way Communication. Users of social media can send messages directly to each other to have conversations about issues. These conversations can be public so even more people can join in to share their opinions. In contrast with traditional media the communication only goes in one direction. From the companies or governments that create the media to the users who consume the media. The last important characteristic of social media that we're going to talk about, is your Online Social Network. A social network is all of the people you know and interact with. These people can be friends, family, coworkers, or even the friends of your friends. So, your online social network is made up of all the people you interact with through social media: your Facebook friends, your Twitter followers, and so on. This online social network is something we don't see with traditional media. We've been talking about the difference between social media and traditional media. But you might have noticed that these days, traditional media is changing to be a little bit more like social media. For example, a television news station might have a website where users can make comments and talk to each other. This is like the two-way communication of social media. In addition, many websites for traditional media companies allow users to make a direct connection to their social media accounts, such as Facebook or Twitter. In this way, the traditional media company can connect to your online social network. Connections between traditional media and social media are becoming more and more common. Later in this unit, we'll read about one example of these connections that explains how many people are using social media to learn about the news. So to summarize social media is the websites and online applications that allow users to create content and share messages with each other. Social media is different from traditional media in its important characteristics. Which are User-Created Content, Two-Way Communication and an Online Social Network. Next, we'll play a game about traditional and social media.