Social media has gone a long way from when it first arrived on the web. Even before any of us recognised or grasped the potential of social media, the earliest incarnations were springing up to link us all to the rest of the globe.
Now, there is an entire generation of adults who have never known a world without social media. It’s part of all of our everyday lives, and some have even built entire professions around social media.
Yet to better comprehend where we’re heading, we need to look at where we’ve been.
In 2003, Myspace began and took off over the web. The exact same year, surprise, LinkedIn debuted as a professional networking and job posting site. As younger people were fretting over their top 8 on Myspace, LinkedIn steadily developed, garnering barely 20 signups every day.
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2004 witnessed the creation of Facebook, when student Mark Zuckerberg founded the site to link Harvard students with one another. In 2005, the platform was given out to university students across the country, appearing significantly different than it does now. No one anticipated Facebook to become the 7th most valuable brand in the world in 2022.
In 2006, Twitter invaded the social media sector with an intriguing niche: you could only write micro tweets of 140 characters or fewer. This micro post format immediately grew popular, and Twitter developed as a leading site for real-time news and updates throughout the world.
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2007 provided the first realistic commercialization of social media sites, with Facebook announcing the launch of the Facebook Advertising platform. In the same year, Chris Messina devised the hashtag – the first technique of classifying social media messages, which eventually became a major part of Twitter’s platform.
Between 2008 and 2009, Facebook and Myspace continued to flourish, attracting millions of members across the world. Nevertheless, Myspace peaked in 2009, and steadily began to decrease, while Facebook continued to increase in popularity, signalling the conclusion of a five-year-long battle between the two networks.
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2010 witnessed the launch of photo-sharing network Instagram. Shaking up the social media landscape, Instagram allowed users focus on visual aesthetics rather than long, wordy messages like Facebook and Twitter.
In the same year, Twitter developed its own advertising platform where users could market their tweets.
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In 2011, Facebook investigated additional sources of income and introduced a desktop ad campaign called Sponsored Stories. Twitter purchased the independent programme “Tweetdeck,” which allowed you to follow numerous feeds, people, and messages across Twitter from the same screen.
The same year, Snapchat emerged on the scene, pioneering ephemeral content inside the social media industry.
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In 2012, Facebook introduced its mobile advertisements programme, and also purchased Instagram. While Instagram remained an independent app under the parent firm Facebook, Facebook debuted Instagram advertisements a few short years later in 2015 that could be controlled from the same backend within Facebook.
The Growth of Video Content: 2016 to Now
In 2016, LinkedIn has expanded to 430 million members. Purchased by Microsoft in 2015 for nearly 26 billion dollars, the company’s largest historical acquisition, LinkedIn had become a true titan among social networks, specialised though it may be.
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In 2018, Instagram introduced IGTV for video content in an attempt to compete with popular video platform YouTube. In the same year, Chinese online giant Bytedance combined its social network TikTok with Musical.ly, and launched abroad under the TikTok name.
2020 is the year TikTok took off internationally, with their challenges attracting the attention of B2C businesses. Instagram, seeking to combat TikTok, created a similar video format called Reels. With the epidemic closing down social contact to social platforms, B2B firms depended on social media to connect with their clients and prospects.
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In 2021, the Digital 2021: Global Overview study indicated reported almost million social media users across the world. This same year, Facebook announced the renaming of its parent corporation into Meta.
Social Media Today
According to the State of B2B Social Media research, social spending are anticipated to expand until 2022 and beyond. LinkedIn advertisements are presently reaching 13% of the world’s population, and Meta continues to become larger and larger.
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There’s no doubting that social media plays a vital part in our lives, and more so if you’re a marketer.
Maintaining many social media channels might be challenging – but you don’t have to do it alone. A solid social media management tool can assist you navigate the always shifting social media world. Check out our buyer’s guide for social media sites!