Friday, January 28, 2011

Social Media vs. Social Networking: What's the Difference?

I have also often heard "social networking" and "social media" interchanged. I think the important element to consider is "marketing." The way I look at social media, it is a channel for marketing much like any other medium. Largely, social media marketing is about branding, visibility, reputation management, sales, etc... while social networking is all about connecting, sharing information and collaborating. Connecting with friends on Facebook is a form of social networking. Connecting with a brand on Facebook is a form of social media marketing for that company. My colleague at Perficient, Mike Porter, is very experienced in the social media and social networking space, particularly when it comes to social collaboration tools such as those provided for the enterprise by companies like IBM and Microsoft. He weighed in recently in a blog post here. I agree with his analysis. I think it's important that as both of these continue to grow and evolve, we should use the correct terminology to help distinguish between what is inherently a more internal, private or personal connection (social networking) and what is a more business directed activity (social media marketing). What do you think?

Amplify’d from blogs.perficient.com

So I’ve seen a lot of people change up how they use these two terms.  In my minds, they are very different although the base technologies used as people going about networking and working the social media may have a huge overlap.


social media: the use of tools like twitter, facebook, blogs, etc to both monitor how your company is doing with your customers and to market your company.


social networking: the use of web 2.0 tools like twitter, facebooks, jive, sharepoint, lotus connections, wikis, blogs, etc to keep up with colleagues, share information, and find information.  This is a natural evolution to the social network you probably already have when you call people, engage people around the water cooler, send emails etc.  These new technologies make it easier to find people and find answers even if your legacy social network is small.


As people continue to make use of web 2.0 tools to to do both, I think we’ll see a maturation of thought around it and of additional tools like social analytics to measure both the quality of social media efforts as well as how a company is using a social network and who is important to that network.  Can you imagine a time when HR will use a social analytics tool to look up a person before they allow a counter-offer to be made in order to keep him or her?

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12 comments:

  1. Completely agree. Glad someone in the marketing industry made the distinction clear. Mike's post is a great perspective from the non-marketing practitioner side of the house as well.

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  2. This is a good post and great introduction into a larger conversation we are seeing all over the web in regards to terminology and definitions. I do agree there is a difference between the two, I even think the explanation you listed is confusing.

    When you talk Social Networking as "to keep up with colleagues, share information, and find information", this also ties very closely into your description of "social media (marketing)" and the idea of brand awareness by sharing information.

    You need one to do the other.

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  8. There is really a great difference between the two. However many people consider these 2 entities as one because of the uses. Social media is used to promote something like business and cause while social networking is a way to interact with other people. If you noticed, it seems like the other one cannot live without the other. As an seo perth specialist, it is okay to interchangeably use these words to refer something related to digital marketing.

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  10. I see that these two are one and the same. Social media is the tool, while, social networking is the act of using social media.

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Thank you for commenting on my blog post! I really appreciate the conversation. -Erin

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