Social Media and Social Networking is among the most popular words nowadays.
You will see that everybody is talking about these latest buzzwords in e-Business promotion and advertising.
Nowadays, social media marketing and social network marketing is among the most popular strategies in Internet Marketing.
A majority of people often swap these words during discussion.
For them both words have same meaning, which is completely wrong.
The reason behind this mass confusion is the interrelation between its practical uses.
However, both terms have different meaning and application.
Let's discuss the differences between social media and social networking in detail.
Media vs.
Networking - The Simplest Way of Clarifying Differences The easiest way to understand the differences between these two terms is to resolve them individually by removing word social.
Now, it's easy to distinguish between these two words media and networking.
Media is responsible for broadcasting an interactive message to the masses, whereas networking involves interaction with people individually.
To understand the differences easily take an example: LinkedIn is among one of the best and most popular tool for social networking.
People use LinkedIn for connection with friends using the group of schools (from where they graduated) or they also use it for business networking by interacting with people of same business/professional interest.
YouTube nowadays is the most popular website for uploading video and sharing it with the whole world.
It's a perfect example of social media, which people/organizations use to broadcast the message meant for masses.
Here people can put their knowledge (in any specific domain) in form of a video, companies can promote their products by creating a video describing its benefits, and it can also be used as a medium to guide or instruct about something.
So, the basic differences must be clear now with example of LinkedIn and YouTube.
However, nowadays there are several other mediums being used by people.
Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, and Twitter offer both social media and social networking features.
In fact, this is the reason behind the confusion between these two popular words.
Because people use these tools to serve both purposes and they assume that it's same.
Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are being used worldwide for SBN and SMO.
Both social media and social networking features are integrated into these websites for maximum benefits.