Social Media Growth

What is social media?

Merriam-Webster defines social media 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.”

Origins of social media

Social media platforms as we know them today have their origins in the early noughties. MySpace, an early example of social media was created in late 2003 and within a year had a million monthly active users, this showed the potential outreach these sites could gain. It was around this time that Facebook was created, initially only aimed at students within the founder’s university, it quickly expanded and by 2005 had 6 million users. But it wasn’t just individuals that were signing up, 2007 saw 100,000 businesses having a page on Facebook, this allowed companies to attract new custom and communicate their products and services to a huge number of people at virtually no cost.

Platform shifts and fallouts

Nowadays Facebook has 2.3 billion users, making it currently the most popular social media platform. Once-dominant, MySpace lost its majority and by 2012 had hardly any share of the market, demonstrating just how rapid things can change if a newer platform comes along with better features/functionality making the former almost obsolete.

One user, multiple platforms

Certain platforms can operate alongside each other without competition, the majority of social media users have accounts on a number of platforms at the same time, Facebook is commonly used for keeping in touch with friends and relatives, but a large number of users are also part of groups where they can connect with others that share certain interests/topics. Twitter is sometimes referred to as microblogging, with its character limit users are restrained to post short messages/updates on their profile, it’s become very popular for discussing topics between users and news outlets have a high outreach on the platform. On Instagram, users upload and share photographs which can be altered with various filters and organised by tags and location, in users feeds all the content posted by accounts they follow appear. YouTube specifically focuses on video-sharing, where users can upload, watch, like and comment on videos, it’s content varies dramatically by users, from vlogging to short original films or corporate media videos uploaded by businesses, selected creators on the platform can earn advertising revenue from their videos.

New platforms

Although most of the social media sites have been around for many years, there are some successful cases of newer platforms, one for instance is TikTok, an app launched in the fall of 2016 which by mid-2018 had already reached half a billion users, averaging 20 million new sign-ups per month over that period.

Notable acquisitions

A recurring theme with social media platforms is that they usually end being bought out by larger internet companies within a couple of years of operations, for instance, Google aquired YouTube in 2006 just a year and a half after its founding for $1.65 billion, at the time no one had seen such a costly takeover of a web platform and it was considered a wild bet because YouTube had many legal liabilities around pirated content being uploaded by users. Back in 2012, Facebook by this time now hugely popular and regarded well took over Instagram for $1 billion, having only 30 million users and zero revenue at the time, in five years it had more than 600 million users and analysts believe if not already it could be a multi-billion dollar ad business.

Business and social media

So how does all this growth of the market effect businesses who use social media? Well 91% of businesses in the U.S use social media to boost their reach, that’s up from 86% in 2013. This shows that although social media was originally intended and used for connections between people, it has since evolved into a massively influential marketing tool, it plays a pivotal role in connecting businesses and marketers to current or potential customers. A near 65% of marketers strongly agreed that social media was very important to their business. Twitter is utilised by both business-to-consumer and business-to-business whilst Facebook is primarily used for business-to-consumer marketing.

sources cited;
Our World in Data, 2019. The rise of social media. [Online] Available at: https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media
Passman, A., 2011. Finding A 'Friend' In The World of Social Media. Credit Union Journal, 15(14).
Statista, 2019. Social media marketing penetration in the U.S 2013-2019. [Online] 
Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/203513/usage-trands-of-social-media-platforms-in-marketing/
The Ringer, 2016. A Decade Ago, Google Bought YouTube — and It Was the Best Tech Deal Ever. [Online] Available at: https://www.theringer.com/2016/10/10/16042354/google-youtube-acquisition-10-years-tech-deals-69fdbe1c8a06
Vox, 2017. Here's why Facebook’s $1 billion Instagram acquisition was such a great deal. [Online] 
Available at: https://www.vox.com/2017/4/9/15235940/facebook-instagram-acquisition-anniversary