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Abstract. The development and expansion of social media have rapidly changed the interaction and communication of people, thereby attracting attention in an unprecedented scale. This paper reviews the relevant literature on social media to yield a better understanding of how it has transformed the way people communicate, acquire and use information. To elucidate on the goals of this paper, the definition of social media, and its characteristics are presented. Different types of social media are also described, including globally popular platforms based on social media types in the 21st century. Lastly, a brief review of the research on social media was presented to provide a reference for researchers.
Keywords: Social media; Social network; Communication tool; Literature review.
Introduction
In the recent years, social media is described as a global phenomenon. There are billions of social media users worldwide and this number keeps on growing. According to the report of Statista in 2020, Eastern Asia has the largest share of social media audiences worldwide with 1.07 billion active users. Among them, China is the biggest social media market with 926.8 million users, India stands at the ranked second with nearly 350 million users (Clement, 2020, July 15).
Social media touches nearly every facet of people's life, allows users to connect with like-minded people and provide information of interest to them. Social media also affects how businesses conduct their transactions, promotions, and services (Bhimani et al., 2018; Appel et al., 2020). These show the proliferation of social media as well as the growing interest for it from both researchers and and practitioners (Kapoor et al., 2018; Ghania et al., 2019). Thus, the number of published articles related to social media is constantly increasing (Olanrewaju, 2020). Along with that, numerous literature review papers on social media have been conducted. These existing papers focus on specific subjects from different fields as marketing (Paquette, 2013; Khan & Jan, 2015), innovation (Bhimani et al., 2018), educational (Chugh & Ruhi, 2018; Ahmed, 2019) or health care (Zhao & Zhang, 2017; Ukoha & Stranieri, 2019). It is in this interest that this paper reviewed relevant studies in different fields to provide a clearer understanding of the intricacies of social media.
The structure of this paper is as follows: first, the definition of...