As we saw in Section 3.1, SNSs are home to whole plethora of networked activities. If you ask the question ‘what is social media' you are likely to get as many different answers as the numbers of individuals that you posed the question to. In all likelihood all of them are partly or mostly correct - none of them actually will describe comprehensively the diversity that is social media in its structures and purposes. My simple response would be something like this: "Social Media is a form of communication utilizing a range of internet based tools and platforms that help to increase and enhance the sharing of information such as texts, images, motion pictures, data and the like." After reading this unit as well as viewing the videos and reading the materials provided why not try writing, in your own words, a definition of social media.

Malaysians seem to have taken to social media like ducks to water. Recent published data is saying that there may be as many as 16 million internet users in our country. This is expected to rise up to 20 million by the end of 2012. We need to be careful about this kind of data, partly because it does not quite gel with other demographics and partly also because a number of active users may have more than one internet account. Table 3.4 is an illustration of our participation score against our neighbours in the region. We are not very far behind the high income countries in our neighbourhood.

Country	% Reach of SNS	Average minutes spent/visitor	Average visits/visitor
South Korea	68.0	277.8	15.1
Singapore	74.3	175.6	19.1
Malaysia	66.6	181.2	14.2
Hong Kong	62.8	127.7	13.7
India	60.3	110.4	10.4
Japan	50.9	72.8	9.9

Table 3.4 Penetration rates of social networks in selected Asian countries

If there is this high penetration of SNSs, the question to ask is, where does all this traffic flow through? There are two sets of statistics available on this. One is called Alexa Traffic Rank and the other is Google Ad Planner. The first measures the website popularity and calculates the site's popularity through visits made and number of views the site's pages receive and the second gathers the data on an automated analysis of the number (millions) of search questions and (unique) site visits. Table 3.4 below presents figures for a three month period ending in mid-July 2009.

International				Local
No	Name	Alexa	Google	No	Name	Alexa	Google
1	Facebook	3	6,200,000	1	Ruumz	1,687	36,000
2	You Tube	4	N/A	2	eKwan	2,045	32,000
3	Friendster	11	4,200,000	3	GoEatOut	2,666	22,000
4	MySpace	12	2,100,000	4	Circles99	3,660	9,300
5	Tagged	12	1,800,000	5	Pacmee	19,444	7,700
6	Flickr	29	1,500,000	6	eMeiMei	21,360	7,000
7	Photobucket	34	1,300,000	7	Friendx	22971	N/A
8	Twitter	38	750,000	8	-	-	-
9	Metcafe	48	910,000	9	-	-	-
10	Ning	82	690,000	10	-	-	-

Figure 3.14 Popular international and indigenous social media sites (SMS) frequented by Malaysians