Research notes Research Topic: Types of Social Media Thesis

Research notes
Research Topic: Types of Social Media
Thesis statement: This essay will compare and contrast three types of social media namely
social networking, micro-blogging and video sharing.
Methodology: Critical review of secondary sources both academic sources and internet sources.
Support:
Social media refers to interactive platforms through which people and communities share the
content or information generated by the users (Brandtzaeg 2012). All of the aforementioned
types of social media has their own significance and can be described as unique, important and
necessary for human activities that form the basis of our social lives (Foreman 2017).
Blogs and micro-blogs for example Twitter allows an individual to share their thoughts with
others. Video sharing social media allows users to share and view music and videos in formats
such as MP3 and MP4 (Manning 2014).
Blogs and micro-blogs and social networking sites have embedded technologies that allow them
to share almost all types of media (Kakkar 2018). Social networking sites enables us to connect
and collaborate with family, friends and different brands (Pulido et al. 2018).
Also social media have changed the way advertising and marketing is done. With the use of
targeted ads, brands can use sites like Facebook to reach over two billion users every month
(Fraidaki et al. 2014).
I picked my sources by searching digital databases like science direct using “types of social
media” as the key word and then checked them for relevance. I did the same for non-academic
sources by searching them on the internet.

Academic Sources
Brandtzaeg, Petter. Social Networking Sites: Their Users and Social Implications — A
Longitudinal Study. Vol. 17, 2012, doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2012.01580.
Fraidaki, Katerina, et al. “Living in the Era of Social Media: How the Different Types of Social
Media May Affect Information Acquisition Process.” Social Computing and Social Media,
Springer, Cham, 2014, pp. 178–85. link.springer.com, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-07632-4_17.
Manning, Jimmie. Definition and Classes of Social Media. 2014, pp. 1158–62.
Pulido, Cristina M., et al. “Social Impact in Social Media: A New Method to Evaluate the Social
Impact of Research.” PLOS ONE, edited by Sergi Lozano, vol. 13, no. 8, Aug. 2018, p.
e0203117. Crossref, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0203117.
Non-Academic sources
Foreman, Curtis. “10 Types of Social Media and How Each Can Benefit Your Business.”
Hootsuite Social Media Management, 20 June 2017, https://blog.hootsuite.com/types-of-
social-media/.
Kakkar, Garima. “What Are the Different Types of Social Media?” Digital Vidya, 12 Sept. 2018,
https://www.digitalvidya.com/blog/types-of-social-media/.