Social Media
Social media is such an integral part of society. It is a large form of communication for most of the world today. What is social media though? Social media is defined by Merriam-Webster's Dictionary (2020) as “forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos).” Two of the main parts of this definition are communication and community. When real life doesn’t always allow for people to find friends and acquaintances within a specific niche, social media is there to remove that barricade. With just a quick search on the internet, users can find a group of fan sites, and community groups to chat in. This post will discuss how social media began, who started it, the top forms of social media and how it influences its users lives today.
Jim Rawson contends social media can build a virtual community in which to transform the sharing of ideas into real life endeavors.
While social media is such a big part of this generation's lives, often society can forget what it was like without its existence. So, where did social media begin and why did it get created? According to an article from History Cooperative, titled The Complete History of Social Media: A Timeline of The Invention of Online Networking (Jones, n.d.) the author states “the emergence of blogging in the 1990s helped usher in the age of social media. The idea that an average person could log on to the internet and write about what they were thinking, feeling, doing, and their personal news, and that these posts could be read by anyone at any time, and responded to, helped people begin to understand the full significance of the internet.” Blogs are still a huge part of social media today and have evolved immensely since the 1990’s along with the rapid growth of the internet in general. The first real form of social media was called “Six Degrees” (Hendricks, 2013).Small Business Trends stated in an article titled Complete History of Social Media: Then and Now (Hendricks, 2013)“The first recognizable social media site, Six Degrees, was created in 1997. It enabled users to upload a profile and make friends with other users.” Six Degrees was created by Andrew Weinreich. Today social media still has profiles, and options to make friends, but now includes so much more!
Logo of Six Degrees
Today, the top forms of social media as stated by Adobe Spark are Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, and Snapchat (Robinson, (n.d.)). These applications and website have millions of visitors every day even though some sites are brand new and some have been around for a while now. According to an article from Investopedia titled “The Story of Instagram: The rise of the #1 Photo-Sharing Application, (Blystone, 2020) Instagram launched in 2010 and was developed by Kevin Systrom. As stated by the article, Instagram is a photo and video sharing platform, but it originally started as an app to share where a user was located, the users plans, and had a photo sharing option which was something new (Blystone, 2020). The article also stated that the original app was called “Burbn” but Kevin then renamed the app Instagram after the app changed to a just photo sharing, liking, and commenting app (Blystone, 2020). A site called Hootsuite shared the statistic that as of the year 2020, Instagram now has one billion people using the app every month (Newberry, 2019).
Facebook, another top competitor in the social media niche in 2020, has been around even longer. According to Britannica, Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes (Hall, 2019). Facebook is similar to Instagram in the fact that you can post photos, comment, and like people's posts, but you can now also use that app to search events, write statuses, and even shop! According to PR Newswire, as of March 2020, Facebook had 1.73 billion users a day (2020)!
As stated above, YouTube is also a top leader when it comes to social media. YouTube is a form of video social media. Users upload videos to a channel, gain subscribers, and can like and comment on videos. According to Business Insider, YouTube was launched in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim (Leskin, 2020). The article states that they had originally launched the site intending for the site to be a dating website, but instead users began posting all kinds of videos (Leskin, 2020). Business Insider states “YouTube has more than 2 billion monthly users visiting the video sharing platform for their favorite vlogs, music videos, sports highlights, and more.” (Leskin, 2020)
Founders of Youtube
Society today is heavily influenced by social media and its users. Today, there are what are known as “social media influencers”. Influencers are people who are sustained financially, completely from influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is defined by Wikipedia as “a form of social media marketing involving endorsements and product placement from influencers, people and organizations who have a purported expert level of knowledge or social influence in their field.” (n.d.) Top Rank Marketing also stated “Influencer marketing is the current hot topic in marketing circles, and it’s not hard to see why. 51% of marketersbelieve that incorporating influencers into their marketing helps them reach customers. Those who do it well earn an average of $6.85 in media value for every dollar they spend. And the top 13% earn $20 or more.” (Nite, (n.d.)) Those are huge statistics! When anyone gets on social media today, users instantly start seeing ads based off things they have searched or pages they follow. Slowly, as a society we are seeing social media turn into a market place for everyone. Social media is such a large part of our lives, and it is very easy to see why people listen to influencers on the internet. This form of communication has rapidly grown over the past two decades. Where social media will have excelled to in 2040 is an exciting mystery!
Works Cited
Blystone, D. (2020, June 06). The story of Instagram: The rise of the #1 photo-sharing application.Retrieved from Investopedia: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/102615/story-instagram-rise-1-photo0sharing-app.asp
Facebook reports first quater 2020 results.(2020, April 29). Retrieved from Cision PR Newswire: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/facebook-reports-first-quarter-2020-results-301049682.html
Hall, M. (2019, May 29). Facebook. Retrieved from Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Facebook
Hendricks, D. (2013, May 08). Complete history of social media: Then and now. Retrieved from Small Business Trends: https://smallbiztrends.com/2013/05/the-complete-history-of-social-media-infographic.html
Influencer Marketing. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influencer_marketing
Jones, M. (n.d.). The complete history of social media: A timeline of the invention of online networking. Retrieved from History Cooperative: https://historycooperative.org/the-history-of-social-media/
Leskin, P. (2020, May 30). YouTube is 15 years old. Here's a timeline of how Youtube was founded, its rise to video behemouth, and its biggest controversies along way.Retrieved from Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-youtube-in-photos-2015-10
Merrriam-Webster. (2020, September 08). Social media. Retrieved from Merriam-Webster Dictionary: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/social%20media
Newberry, C. (2019, October 22). 37 Instagram stats that matter to marketers in 2020.Retrieved from Hootsuite: https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-statistics/
Nite, J. ((n.d.)). What is influencer marketing? Definitions, examples, and resources.Retrieved from Top Rank Marketing: https://www.toprankblog.com/2016/05/what-is-influencer-marketing/
Robinson, R. ((n.d.)). The 7 top social media sites you need to care about in 2020.Retrieved from Adobe Spark: https://spark.adobe.com/make/learn/top-social-media-sites/