Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Communications - Multimedia, Internet, New Technologies, grade: 1,3, Institut for Interpreter and Languages Munich, course: Zeitgeschehen Englisch, language: English, abstract: In the last years, social media platforms have experienced a boom that is hard to

compare with anything similar before.

There is hardly anybody that does not have his own Facebook account and probably

everybody has watched at least one video on YouTube in his life.

Those few people without Facebook are being watched skeptically, usually

accompanied by the question how can you live without it without feeling excluded?.

This shows how important social media has become in our everyday lives and that

we no longer can imagine living without being connected 24/7.

The following paper will first give a general insight into to the development of social

media and social media platforms (with a focus on Twitter and Facebook) and then

show their importance and influence on the presidential elections in the

United States of America in 2012.

At the end there will be a short forecast about how social media will probably develop

within the next years.