Social media websites can be defined as interactive web platforms that can be used by site members to share, create, discuss, and modify content directly on the website.

Well known social media sites include Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn but there are many other social media sites like Bebo, Blogger etc. Each platform has it's own particular purpose and strong points.  The biggest distinction is whether the social media has a leaning towards business to business (B2B), business to consumer (B2C), consumer to consumer (C2C) or just social, visitor to visitor (V2V).  In addition to the different purposes, the types or technologies used for Social media technologies take on a range of different forms.  These include social networks, wikis, blogs, micro-blogs, forums, magazines, podcasts, picture or image sharing, rating sites etc.

Social media is now an important component os search engine optimisation (SEO) as many of the dominant search engines like Google and Bing have incorporating social data into their seatch algorithms.