What do you want from Social Media?

Everyone is on "social media"...

... but people I know in the "real world" seem to think about social media differently.

Maybe they have a different wishes, needs, or view of what social media is and what it's for?

So I thought I should lay down what social media means for me.

What is social media?

For me social media is not this or that platform: it isn't Facebook, it isn't Twitter and for those that know me no .... it's not Google+ either.

Run the question past Google ...

"websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking."

What is social networking? 

Run that past Google and you get ...

"the use of dedicated websites and applications to interact with other users, or to find people with similar interests to oneself."

You can probably see where this is going. Define: interact

"act in such a way as to have an effect on another; act reciprocally. 

synonyms: communicate …"

Here's my succinct one word definition of social media for me. That one word is "communicate".

Communication

That's what I use social media for: what else could it be for?
It's such a simple definition, such a simple idea.

To sum up, if social media is about communication what then matters is how can you use it to communicate.