Social Media Has Grown by

Table of Contents

1. A Brief History of Social Media
   • The Launch of Social Sites
2. Social Media: End Users and Businesses
3. How Marketing Pros Utilize Social Media
4. What's Side by side For Social Media

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

According to Merriam-Webster, social media is divers as "forms of electronic advice (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 as videos)." The 2019 Pew Inquiry Center report on social media apply in the United states of america showed that 72% of American adults utilize some form of social media. In 2005, the year after Facebook went alive, that number was 5%.

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

A Cursory History of Social Media

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

How did it begin? How has social media affected the lives of billions of people? How have businesses adapted to the digital consumer lifestyle? How practise marketing professionals use social media? It's all part of the story of social media's ongoing evolution.

Pre-cyberspace 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 machine.

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 article in The Washington Mail, "Before Twitter and Facebook, There Was Morse Code: Remembering Social Media's True Inventor," details the history and relevance of Morse code, complete with early versions of today's "OMG" and "LOL."

While the roots of digital communication run deep, near contemporary accounts of the modern origins of today'due south internet and social media point to the emergence in 1969 of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network — the ARPANET.

This early digital network, created by the Us Department of Defense, allowed scientists at four interconnected universities to share software, hardware, and other information.

In 1987, the direct precursor to today's internet came into being when the National Science Foundation launched a more robust, nationwide digital network known equally the NSFNET. A decade after, in 1997, the get-go truthful social media platform was launched.

The Launch of Social Sites

In the 1980s and '90s, according to "The History of Social Networking" on the engineering science 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 e-mail, message lath messaging, and real-time online chatting.

This gave ascension to the primeval social media networks, beginning with the curt-lived Six Degrees profile uploading service in 1997.

This service was followed in 2001 by Friendster. These rudimentary platforms attracted millions of users and enabled email accost registration and basic online networking.

Weblogs, or blogs, another early on class of digital social communication, began to gain popularity with the 1999 launch of the LiveJournal publishing site. This coincided with the launch of the Blogger publishing platform by the tech company Pyra Labs, which was purchased by Google in 2003.

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

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

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

Google'southward attempt to elbow its mode into the social media landscape, Google+, launched in 2012. A rocky existence came to an end in 2018, after the individual information of nearly 500,000 Google+ users was compromised by a data security alienation.

Dorsum To Top

Modern Social Media Outlets

Today'southward social media landscape is populated past a suite of services that jockey for the attention of more than than v billion mobile device users worldwide. Here is an overview of the virtually prominent social media networks of 2020:

Facebook

Launched in 2004 by Harvard pupil Marker Zuckerberg, it has nearly i.7 billion users — including 69% of U.S. adults, co-ordinate to Pew Research.

• HubSpot: Facebook Marketing

Reddit

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

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

Twitter

Founded in 2006 past Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Rock, and others every bit a microblogging site, past 2020, 22% of U.Southward. adults were Twitter users, according to Pew Research.

• Hootsuite: Twitter Marketing: The Complete Guide for Business

Instagram

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

• HubSpot: Instagram Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

Pinterest

Founded in 2010 past iPhone app developer Ben Silbermann as a visual "pivot board," Pinterest became a publicly traded visitor in 2019 and has more than 335 meg agile monthly users.

• Sprout Social: Your 5-Step Pinterest Marketing Guide

Snapchat

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

• Hootsuite: Snapchat for Business

TikTok

Founded in 2016 by Chinese tech company ByteDance, this short-form video-sharing site was merged with the U.S.-based mobile app Musical.ly in 2018 and became popular with American teens and young adults. Every bit of early 2020, it had more than than 800 million users worldwide.

• Business organisation Insider: TikTok Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2020

Dorsum To Peak

Social Media: Terminate Users and Businesses

What began equally a desktop or laptop experience shifted to mobile phones and tablets every bit 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 by serving their customers new, simpler methods of interacting — and new ways of buying appurtenances and services.

The End-User Experience

At first, social media existed to aid end users connect digitally with friends, colleagues, family members, and like-minded individuals they might never have met in person. Desktop admission to bulletin lath services such every bit 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 commencement iPhone, launched past 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 environment.

Technological improvements — specifically, powerful in-telephone cameras — shifted the focus of mobile apps to video and images. In add-on to written messages, end users could at present circulate in real fourth dimension.

Instagram, in detail, became the app of pick for social media users interested in travel, entertainment, style, and other visually oriented topics.

The Concern Experience

As 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 Development of Social Media Advertising," sums it upwardly: "Users don't simply log in and browse, they tell the platforms their proper noun, and where they live, what they similar 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 various forms of sponsored advertising.

In improver 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 act of creating and sharing informative or entertaining content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms is an attempt by brands to grow an audition organically, in other words, without paying for it directly.

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

• Increase brand awareness
• Generate leads and increase conversions
• Develop and nurture relationships with customers
• Learn from competitors

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

• Sprout Social: How to Build Your Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2020
• Forbes: How Social Media Can Motion Your Business organisation Forward
• Social Media Examiner: The Guide for Social Media Marketing for Businesses

Dorsum To Elevation

How Marketing Pros Utilize Social Media

As the ability to reach consumers expanded thanks to social media, marketing professionals quickly adapted. Social media's evolution provided measurement tools that gave marketing professionals unprecedented access to valuable, actionable data about consumers' demographics, buying habits, and more.

With marketers no longer limited to traditional forms of media — TV, radio, print, post, billboards, magazines, etc. — the social media marketing manufacture was born.

Taking Advantage of Social Media's Popularity

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

According to an article 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 have a dedicated social following and are viewed as experts within their niche."

These social media influencers spend time edifice trust with their audiences. With more than than iii.2 billion social media users worldwide, finding influencers whose audiences fall into the visitor's niche of consumers helps cut through the dissonance 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 permit digital marketers to target specific demographic groups with ads. This can exist useful for building brand sensation among potential long-term customers, besides as for generating leads for specific products or services.

• Influencer Marketing Hub: What is an Influencer?
• Social Media Today: 4 Influencer Marketing Trends That Will Boss in 2020
• Influencer Marketing Hub: The Land of Influencer Marketing 2020: Benchmark Report

The Importance of Engagement and Integration

Social media engagement consists of the diverse 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 Folio Analytics, etc.).

Each of these engagements presents an opportunity for marketers to influence a client or grouping of customers. For example, a visitor that monitors its Twitter feed in real fourth dimension — either through an automated service or in person — is positioned to reply quickly to a customer's request or comment.

In addition, information that reveals users' habits over time tin be integrated into a long-term social media strategy. For example, Facebook Insights shows when users are most active on the platform. This data can be used to determine when is the all-time time to mail new content, giving information technology a better chance to be seen.

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

Personifying the Company

Another Sprout Social commodity, "5 Actionable Strategies for Social Media Branding," provides guidelines for how social media tin be used to develop a visitor's public "voice." The bottom line when it comes to social media branding is authenticity. Today'due south savvy digital consumers expect a robust and "real" personality from brands. Sprout Social's tactical advice includes:

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

Companies that fail to develop a consequent, engaging social media presence are not taking full advantage of the marketing tools bachelor in today's competitive marketplace.

Dorsum To Top

The Future of Social Media

What happens next in social media nearly certainly will be shaped by the evolving business model, too as by advances in storytelling technology. How will mega platforms such every bit Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and others make money? How will end users adapt? How will businesses spread their messages and use social media to build audiences? The answers to these questions volition decide the adjacent stage of social media's evolution.

Premium Social Media Services

What does the time to come hold for social media? According to a recent article in Entrepreneur, "xi Ways Social Media Will Evolve in the Futurity," consumers volition gravitate toward services that allow them to:

• Personalize content at a granular level
• Reduce the amount of vitriol and conflict usually found on public social media feeds
• Increase focus on protecting privacy
• Accept greater advantage of the utility of mobile devices
• Focus more on community edifice

This could mean a move toward paid subscription services on social media, according to Entrepreneur. The challenge for marketing professionals will be to meet the shifting demands of social media users while maintaining an authentic make voice.

Social Media Video

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

Co-ordinate to HubSpot'southward "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 east-books for the starting time time. Video's prominence as a marketing tool is expected to keep to grow, based on the latest data in Wyzowl'south "The Land of Video Marketing in 2020 [New Information]."

This survey constitute that 88% of marketers received positive returns on investment through video. Perchance about significantly, 59% of marketers who said they had non previously used video intended to practice so in 2020 and beyond.

What's Next for Social Media?

The hereafter of social media is limited but by the imagination of its stakeholders. The brief history of the manufacture has proven that the rapid change — advances in engineering science, more-strident fiscal demands, shifting cultural dynamics — volition transform the current social media landscape.

Will Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other major platforms become the mode 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 as technology evolves?

Human beings are social creatures. Commerce is driven past human interaction. These two facts volition continue to shape the development of social media into the next decade and beyond.

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Recommended Reading

How to Go a Social Media Managing director

What Tin Y'all Do with a Marketing Degree?

Why Should You Major in Marketing?

Sources

Digital Trends, "The History of Social Networking

Encyclopedia Britannica, Myspace

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

Forbes, "How Social Media Can Move Your Business concern Forward

The Guardian, "Google Buys Blogger Spider web Service

HubSpot, "Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

HubSpot, "The State of Video Marketing in 2020 (New Data)

IAS Insider, "The Evolution of Social Media Advertising

LiveJournal, About LiveJournal

Maryville University, "How to Go a Social Media Manager

National Scientific discipline Foundation, "NSF and the Birth of the Net

Pew Research Center, 10 Facts About Americans and Twitter

Pew Inquiry Center, Smartphone Ownership Is Growing Speedily Around the World, just Not Always As

Pew Research Center, Social Media Fact Sail

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, Pct of U.S. Population with a Social Media Profile from 2008 to 2019

Statista, Pinterest — Statistics & Facts

TheStreet, "History of Snapchat: Timeline and Facts

TechCrunch, "Looking Back at Google+

Infographic Sources

CNBC, "Digital Ad Acquirement In The Us Surpassed $100 Billion For The First Time In 2018

IAB / PricewaterhouseCoopers, "IAB Internet Advertizement Revenue Study: 2018 Full Twelvemonth Results

Pew Research Center, "10 Facts About Americans and Facebook

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