Much of the Growth in Social Media Sites Can Be Attributed to:

Table of Contents

A Brief History of Social Media
- The Launch of Social Sites
Social Media: Stop Users and Businesses
How Marketing Pros Utilize Social Media
What's Next For Social Media

The evolution of social media has been fueled past the human being impulse to communicate and by advances in digital engineering. It is a story about establishing and nurturing personal connections at scale.

Co-ordinate to Merriam-Webster, social media is defined as "forms of electronic communication (such every bit websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such equally videos)." The 2022 Pew Inquiry Center written report on social media use in the United States showed that 72% of American adults use some form of social media. In 2005, the year after Facebook went live, that number was five%.

What follows is an examination of the origins of social media, its relatively rapid growth as a sociological and commercial force, and the alter it has brought to the marketing globe.

A Brief History of Social Media

In less than a generation, social media has evolved from directly electronic information substitution, to virtual gathering place, to retail platform, to vital 21st-century marketing tool.

How did it begin? How has social media afflicted the lives of billions of people? How accept businesses adapted to the digital consumer lifestyle? How do marketing professionals utilise social media? Information technology's all function of the story of social media's ongoing development.

Pre-internet Roots

In a sense, social media began on May 24, 1844, with a series of electronic dots and dashes tapped out past hand on a telegraph auto.

The first electronic message from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., proved Samuel Morse understood the historic ramifications of his scientific achievement: "What hath God wrought?" he wrote.

A recent commodity in The Washington Mail service, "Before Twitter and Facebook, In that location Was Morse Code: Remembering Social Media'southward True Inventor," details the history and relevance of Morse lawmaking, complete with early versions of today'southward "OMG" and "LOL."

While the roots of digital communication run deep, nigh contemporary accounts of the mod origins of today's cyberspace and social media indicate to the emergence in 1969 of the Advanced Enquiry Projects Agency Network — the ARPANET.

This early digital network, created by the United states of america Department of Defense, immune scientists at four interconnected universities to share software, hardware, and other data.

In 1987, the straight precursor to today'southward internet came into beingness when the National Science Foundation launched a more than robust, nationwide digital network known as the NSFNET. A decade later on, in 1997, the first true social media platform was launched.

The Launch of Social Sites

In the 1980s and '90s, according to "The History of Social Networking" on the technology news site Digital Trends, the internet's growth enabled the introduction of online communication services such as CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy. They introduced users to digital communication through email, message board messaging, and real-fourth dimension online chatting.

This gave ascension to the earliest social media networks, beginning with the short-lived Six Degrees contour uploading service in 1997.

This service was followed in 2001 by Friendster. These rudimentary platforms attracted millions of users and enabled e-mail accost registration and bones online networking.

Weblogs, or blogs, another early grade of digital social advice, began to proceeds popularity with the 1999 launch of the LiveJournal publishing site. This coincided with the launch of the Blogger publishing platform by the tech visitor Pyra Labs, which was purchased past Google in 2003.

In 2002, LinkedIn was founded as a networking site for career-minded professionals. By 2020, it had grown to more than 675 one thousand thousand users worldwide. It remains the social media site of option for chore seekers as well as human resources managers searching for qualified candidates.

Two other major forays into social media collapsed afterward a burst of initial success. In 2003, Myspace launched. By 2006, it was the most visited website on the planet, spurred by users' ability to share new music directly on their contour pages.

By 2008, it was eclipsed by Facebook. In 2011, Myspace was purchased by musician Justin Timberlake for $35 million, but information technology has since become a social media reconsideration.

Google'due south attempt to elbow its way into the social media landscape, Google+, launched in 2012. A rocky existence came to an end in 2018, later on the private information of about 500,000 Google+ users was compromised past a data security breach.

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Modern Social Media Outlets

Today'south social media landscape is populated by a suite of services that jockey for the attending of more than 5 billion mobile device users worldwide. Here is an overview of the most prominent social media networks of 2020:

Facebook

Launched in 2004 past Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, it has well-nigh 1.7 billion users — including 69% of U.S. adults, co-ordinate to Pew Research.

HubSpot: Facebook Marketing

Launched in 2005 by Massachusetts 20-somethings Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian as a news-sharing platform, its 300 1000000 users have transformed Reddit into a combination news aggregation/social commentary site. Its popularity is based on the ability to "upwardly-vote" and "down-vote" user posts.

Social Media Examiner: How to Marketplace on Reddit: A Guide for Businesses

Twitter

Founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and others as a microblogging site, past 2020, 22% of U.Southward. adults were Twitter users, co-ordinate to Pew Research.

Hootsuite: Twitter Marketing: The Complete Guide for Concern

Instagram

Founded in 2010 past Stanford graduate Kevin Systrom as a photo-sharing site and purchased past Facebook in 2012, Instagram has more than 1 billion users worldwide.

HubSpot: Instagram Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

Founded in 2010 by iPhone app programmer Ben Silbermann as a visual "pin lath," Pinterest became a publicly traded company in 2022 and has more than 335 million active monthly users.

Sprout Social: Your five-Step Pinterest Marketing Guide

Snapchat

Founded in 2011 by a trio of Stanford students — Evan Spiegel, Reggie Chocolate-brown, and Bobby Tater — this video-sharing service introduced the concept of "stories," or serialized brusque videos, and "filters," run for informative digital furnishings, oftentimes based on location.

Hootsuite: Snapchat for Business

TikTok

Founded in 2022 by Chinese tech company ByteDance, this brusque-form video-sharing site was merged with the U.S.-based mobile app Musical.ly in 2022 and became pop with American teens and young adults. As of early 2020, it had more than 800 million users worldwide.

Business Insider: TikTok Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2020

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Social Media: Terminate Users and Businesses

What began equally a desktop or laptop experience shifted to mobile phones and tablets as cellular service expanded; the capabilities of cellular phones expanded, turning them into "smartphones"; and high-speed wireless internet became more readily available in homes, businesses, and public spaces.

With the advent of social media apps that could run on smartphones, end users could take their communities with them wherever they went.

Businesses took advantage of this new consumer mobility past serving their customers new, simpler methods of interacting — and new ways of buying goods and services.

The End-User Experience

At first, social media existed to help finish users connect digitally with friends, colleagues, family members, and like-minded individuals they might never have met in person. Desktop admission to bulletin board services such as CompuServe and Prodigy made it easier to grow free online communities without ever leaving the house.

The invention of the smartphone liberated social media from the desktop and laptop computer. Apple's first iPhone, launched by Steve Jobs in 2007, helped shift the focus of online customs building to mobile. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media services thrived in the mobile app surround.

Technological improvements — specifically, powerful in-phone cameras — shifted the focus of mobile apps to video and images. In add-on to written messages, stop users could now broadcast in existent fourth dimension.

Instagram, in item, became the app of choice for social media users interested in travel, entertainment, manner, and other visually oriented topics.

The Business Feel

Every bit social media companies grew their user bases into the hundreds of millions, the business applications of Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms began to take shape. Social media companies had access to some of the richest trackable user data ever conceived.

A contempo article on IAS Insider, "The Evolution of Social Media Advertising," sums it up: "Users don't only log in and scan, they tell the platforms their name, and where they live, what they like and who they know, painting the most vivid picture currently possible for marketers looking to target specific consumers."

Facebook began to place ads on its platform as early as 2006. Twitter enabled ads in 2010. LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok all have attempted to monetize their services through diverse forms of sponsored advertising.

In addition to placing ads on social media platforms, companies discovered the potential utility of cultivating an active, engaged social media presence. Whereas social media advertising must be paid for, the human activity of creating and sharing informative or entertaining content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms is an attempt by brands to abound an audition organically, in other words, without paying for information technology directly.

According to HubSpot's "Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate Guide," companies utilise organic social media marketing to:

Increase make sensation
Generate leads and increment conversions
Develop and nurture relationships with customers
Acquire from competitors

The combination of advertising, or paid social media marketing, and organic social media outreach evolved into the digital marketing specialty known as social media marketing.

Sprout Social: How to Build Your Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2020
Forbes: How Social Media Tin can Move Your Business Forwards
Social Media Examiner: The Guide for Social Media Marketing for Businesses

How Marketing Pros Utilize Social Media

As the power to reach consumers expanded cheers to social media, marketing professionals apace adapted. Social media'south evolution provided measurement tools that gave marketing professionals unprecedented access to valuable, actionable information virtually consumers' demographics, buying habits, and more.

With marketers no longer express to traditional forms of media — Telly, radio, impress, mail, billboards, magazines, etc. — the social media marketing manufacture was born.

Taking Reward of Social Media's Popularity

The most efficient way to take advantage of social media's popularity is to leverage existing audiences. To that end, digital marketers appoint social media "influencers" to share messaging and product offers with their followers.

According to an commodity on Sprout Social'due south website, "What Is Influencer Marketing: How to Develop Your Strategy," influencer marketing is defined as "a type of social media marketing that uses endorsements and product mentions from influencers — individuals who accept a dedicated social post-obit and are viewed equally experts within their niche."

These social media influencers spend time building trust with their audiences. With more than 3.two billion social media users worldwide, finding influencers whose audiences fall into the visitor's niche of consumers helps cut through the noise by targeting specific potential buyers.

While influencers provide companies a layer of congenital-in consumer trust, social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn provide in-depth analytics that allow digital marketers to target specific demographic groups with ads. This tin can be useful for building brand sensation amid potential long-term customers, too as for generating leads for specific products or services.

Influencer Marketing Hub: What is an Influencer?
Social Media Today: iv Influencer Marketing Trends That Will Dominate in 2020
Influencer Marketing Hub: The State of Influencer Marketing 2020: Benchmark Report

The Importance of Date and Integration

Social media engagement consists of the various ways users respond to a mail. This can include comments, follows, shares (retweets on Twitter), and clicks on a shared link. All of these actions are measurable thanks to analytics provided by the social media platforms (Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, LinkedIn Page Analytics, etc.).

Each of these engagements presents an opportunity for marketers to influence a customer or group of customers. For example, a company that monitors its Twitter feed in real time — either through an automatic service or in person — is positioned to respond apace to a customer's request or comment.

In addition, data that reveals users' habits over time tin exist integrated into a long-term social media strategy. For example, Facebook Insights shows when users are well-nigh agile on the platform. This data can be used to determine when is the best time to mail service new content, giving it a better take chances to exist seen.

Another way marketers employ social media is to monitor cultural trends and, if applicative, incorporate brand-specific concepts that build on those trends to entice customers to appoint with the company's content.

Personifying the Company

Another Sprout Social article, "5 Actionable Strategies for Social Media Branding," provides guidelines for how social media can be used to develop a visitor's public "voice." The bottom line when information technology comes to social media branding is actuality. Today's savvy digital consumers await a robust and "real" personality from brands. Sprout Social's tactical advice includes:

Develop and utilize consequent visual branding across all social media platforms
Use a tone that reflects the brand'south public persona
Cater to marketing personas based on social media metrics

Companies that fail to develop a consistent, engaging social media presence are not taking full advantage of the marketing tools available in today'south competitive market place.

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The Future of Social Media

What happens adjacent in social media about certainly will be shaped past the evolving business concern model, too equally by advances in storytelling technology. How will mega platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and others brand money? How will end users adapt? How volition businesses spread their messages and apply social media to build audiences? The answers to these questions will determine the side by side phase of social media'southward evolution.

Premium Social Media Services

What does the future concord for social media? According to a recent article in Entrepreneur, "11 Ways Social Media Will Evolve in the Future," consumers will gravitate toward services that allow them to:

Personalize content at a granular level
Reduce the corporeality of vitriol and conflict commonly found on public social media feeds
Increase focus on protecting privacy
Have greater reward of the utility of mobile devices
Focus more on customs building

This could mean a motility toward paid subscription services on social media, according to Entrepreneur. The claiming for marketing professionals will be to encounter the shifting demands of social media users while maintaining an authentic brand vocalization.

Social Media Video

Another growing point of accent for social media in the hereafter, co-ordinate to Entrepreneur, volition be video content. Video marketing already has a substantial presence in the U.S., where it is a $135 billion manufacture in 2020, according to Social Media Today.

According to HubSpot's "The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2020," video became the No. ane form of media used in content marketing in 2019, surpassing blogs and eastward-books for the first fourth dimension. Video's prominence every bit a marketing tool is expected to proceed to abound, based on the latest information in Wyzowl'south "The Land of Video Marketing in 2022 [New Data]."

This survey found that 88% of marketers received positive returns on investment through video. Perhaps most significantly, 59% of marketers who said they had not previously used video intended to do then in 2022 and beyond.

What'southward Next for Social Media?

The futurity of social media is limited only past the imagination of its stakeholders. The brief history of the industry has proven that the rapid change — advances in applied science, more-strident financial demands, shifting cultural dynamics — will transform the current social media landscape.

Will Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other major platforms go the way of Google+ and MySpace? Will the entrepreneurial heirs of Twitter creator Biz Stone and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg build on the success of their predecessors? Can social media maintain its relevance equally applied science evolves?

Human beings are social creatures. Commerce is driven by human interaction. These two facts will go on to shape the development of social media into the side by side decade and beyond.

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Recommended Reading

How to Become a Social Media Director

What Can You Do with a Marketing Degree?

Why Should Y'all Major in Marketing?

Sources

Digital Trends, "The History of Social Networking

Encyclopedia Britannica, Myspace

Entrepreneur, "11 Ways Social Media Will Evolve in the Hereafter

Forbes, "How Social Media Tin can Move Your Business Forward

The Guardian, "Google Buys Blogger Spider web Service

HubSpot, "Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

HubSpot, "The State of Video Marketing in 2022 (New Information)

IAS Insider, "The Evolution of Social Media Advertising

LiveJournal, About LiveJournal

Maryville University, "How to Go a Social Media Manager

National Science Foundation, "NSF and the Birth of the Internet

Pew Research Center, 10 Facts Virtually Americans and Twitter

Pew Research Center, Smartphone Ownership Is Growing Rapidly Effectually the Globe, but Non Always Equally

Pew Inquiry Centre, Social Media Fact Sheet

Social Media Today, The History of Social Media

Social Media Today, Video Marketing Statistics for 2020

Sprout Social, "5 Actionable Strategies for Social Media Branding

Sprout Social, "What Is Influencer Marketing: How to Develop Your Strategy

Statista, Percentage of U.S. Population with a Social Media Contour from 2008 to 2019

Statista, Pinterest — Statistics & Facts

TheStreet, "History of Snapchat: Timeline and Facts

TechCrunch, "Looking Dorsum at Google+

Infographic Sources

CNBC, "Digital Advert Revenue In The US Surpassed $100 Billion For The Commencement Time In 2018

IAB / PricewaterhouseCoopers, "IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Study: 2022 Full Year Results

Pew Research Eye, "10 Facts Nearly Americans and Facebook

Pew Research Heart, "Share of U.S. Adults Using Social Media, Including Facebook, Is Mostly Unchanged Since 2018

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Source: https://online.maryville.edu/blog/evolution-social-media/