Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they crea te, share, exchange and

comment contents among themselves in virtual communities and networks.[1] Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technolog ical foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-ge nerated content.[2] Furthermore,social media employ mobile and web-based technol ogies to create highly interactive platforms via which individuals and communiti es share, cocreate, discuss, and modify user-generated content. It introduces su bstantial and pervasive changes to communication between organizations, communit ies and individuals[3] Social media has lots of pros and cons, which you can read about here. Different types of social media include collaborative projects such as Wikipedia , blogs such as Blogger, social networking sites like Facebook, content communit ies like Youtube, and virtual worlds like Second Life[4] . As of 2012, social me dia has become one of the most powerful sources for news updates through platfor ms such as Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, WordPress, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+. Tumblr, MySpace and Wikia[5]. In addition, there has been an increase in mobile social media which has created new opportunities, in particulate for business, w hich are able to utilize social media for marketing research, sales promotions, and customer relationship development among others[6]. Social media differentiates from traditional/industrial media in many aspects su ch as quality [7], reach, frequency, usability, immediacy and permanence[8]. The internet usage effects of social media as of 2012 are, according to Nielsen, th at internet users continue to spend more time in social media than any other sit e. At the same time, the total time spent on social media in the U.S. across PC and mobile devices increased by 37 percent to 121 billion minutes in July 2012 c ompared to 88 billion minutes in July 2011[5]. Much of the criticism of social media are about its exclusiveness as most sites do not allow the transfer of information from one to another, disparity of infor mation available, issues with trustworthiness and reliability of information pre sented, concentration, ownership of media content, and the meaning of interactio ns created by social media. However, it is also argued that social media has pos itive effects such as allowing the democratization of the internet [9] while als o allowing individuals to advertise themselves and form friendships[10].