ABSTRACT
Six years ago there was no Facebook. Today, Facebook has over 500 million active users (Facebook, 2010). YouTube was created in 2005 and, every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded onto the site and people watch over two billion videos a day on YouTube (YouTube, 2010). Even younger than Facebook and YouTube is Twitter, which was created just 4 years ago. According to a study by PEW Research Center, one in 10 American adults who use the Internet are Twitter users (Gaudin, 2010) and nine in 10 Americans visit online social networks every month (comScore, 2011). Not only has social media adoption increased multifold over the last couple of years, but the time spent on these websites has also increased by 82% from 2008 with users spending an average of 6 hours or more on social networking sites per month (Nielsen, 2010a). According to some estimates, social media account for 11-16% of all time spent online in the United States (comScore, 2011; SAS Institute, 2010). Therefore, it comes as no surprise that social media websites have become the most popular activity on the Web, surpassing pornography for the first time in the history of the Internet (Qualman, 2009). Collectively called social media, websites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Four Square, MySpace, LinkedIn, Delicious, and Yelp are also referred to as social networking sites, user-generated content, Web 2.0 technologies, social computing, social web, citizen media, participatory media, and consumer-generated media. Several definitions for social media exist in the literature but the most commonly cited definition is by Andreas and Haenlein (2010). According to them, social media “is a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content” (p. 61). Social media can also be defined as
web-based services that allow individuals to (a) construct a public or semipublic profile within a bounded system, (b) articulate a list of other users with
whom they share a connection, (c) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system and (d) create and share content.
