In this article, we discussed about the evolution of social media, the meaning of social media, and its future.
Definition
The evolution of social media has been powered by the human desire to communicate and by advances in digital technology. It is a story about establishing and developing personal connections at scale.
social media is defined 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).” The 2019 Pew-Research centre External link: open new 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 5%.
A Brief History of Social Media
In less than a generation, social media has evolved from direct electronic information exchange, to virtual gathering place, 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 do marketing professionals use social media? It’s all part of the story of social media’s ongoing evolution.
Pre-internet Roots
In a sense, social media began on May 24, 1844, with a series of electronic dots and dashes tapped out by 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.
the evolution of social media in a recent article in The Washington Post, “Before Twitter and Facebook, There Was Morse Code: Remembering Social Media’s True Inventor External link: open _in_ new,” 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, most modern accounts of the modern origins of today’s 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 United States Department of Defense, allowed scientists at four interconnected universities to share software, hardware, and other data.
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 as the. NSFNET External link: open _in _new decade later, in 1997, the first true social media platform was launched.
The Launch of Social Sites
In the 1980s and ’90s, on the technology news site Digital Trends, the internet’s growth enabled the introduction of online communication services such as CompuServe, America Online, and Genius. They introduced users to digital communication through email, bulletin board messaging, and real-time online chatting. This gave rise to the earliest social media networks, beginning with the short-lived Six Degrees profile uploading service in 1997.This service was followed in 2001 by Friendster. These basic platforms attracted millions of users and enabled email address registration and basic online networking.
Weblogs, or blogs, another early form of digital social communication, began to gain popularity with the 1999 launch of the publishing site. This accorded 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 675.
million users worldwide. It remains the social media site of choice for job seekers as well as human resources managers searching for qualified candidates.
Two other major forays into social media collapsed after 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 profile pages.
By 2008, it was eclipsed by Facebook. In 2011, Myspace was purchased by musician Justin Timberlake for $35 million, but it has since become a social media after thought.
Google’s attempt to elbow its way into the social media landscape Google External link: open_ in new launched in 2012. A rocky existence came to an end in 2018, after the private information of nearly 500,000 Google+ users was compromised by a data security breach.
Modern Social Media Outlets
Today’s social media landscape is populated by a suite of services that jockey for the attention of more than 5 billion mobile device users worldwide Here is an overview of the most prominent social media networks of 2020:
Launched in 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, it has nearly 1.7 billion users — including 69% of U.S. adults, according to Pew Research.
Launched in 2005 by Massachusetts 20-somethings Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian as a news-sharing platform, its 300 million users have transformed Reddit into a combination news aggregation/social commentary site. Its popularity is based on the ability to “up-vote” and “down-vote” user posts.
Founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and others as a microblogging site, by 2020, 22% of U.S. adults were Twitter users.
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.
Founded in 2010 by iPhone app developer Ben Silbermann as a visual “pin board,” became a publicly traded company in 2019 and has more than 335 million active monthly users.
Snapchat
Founded in 2011 by a trio of Stanford students — Evan Spiegel, Reggie Brown, and Bobby Murphy — this sharing of video introduced the concept of “stories,” or serialized short videos, and “filters,” run for educational digital effects, often based on location.
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. As of early 2020, it had more than 800 million users worldwide.
Social Media: End Users and Businesses
The evolution social media What began as a desktop or laptop experience removed 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 by 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 end users connect digitally with friends, colleagues, family members, and like-minded individuals they might never have met in person. Desktop access 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 community building to mobile. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media services boomed in the mobile app environment.
The Business 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.
How Marketing Pros Utilize Social Media
As the ability to reach consumers expanded thanks to social media, marketing professionals quickly modified. Social media’s evolution provided measurement tools that gave marketing professionals unique 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, mail, billboards, magazines, etc. — the social media marketing industry was born.
The Future of Social Media
What happens next in social media almost certainly will be shaped by the evolving business model, as well as by advances in storytelling technology. How will mega platforms such as 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 will determine the next stage of social media’s evolution.
Conclusion
The future of social media is limited only by the imagination of its stakeholders. The brief history of the industry has proven that the rapid change — advances in technology, 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 commercial successors 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 by human interaction. These two facts will continue to shape the evolution of social media into the next decade and beyond,