The Evolution of Social Media Marketing

Saying that social media has taken the world just like a storm is like saying that rain is wet or that fire hurts—it’s a bit of an understatement. We live in a world where Facebook alone has over 1.65 billion active monthly users.

In fact, imagining the day-to-day activities without social media has almost become near to impossible. Right from sharing personal posts to executing extensive campaigns.

It has definitely acquired different roles to different people. It’s a phenomenon that affects both casual users and businesses alike.

Social Media Evolution: The First Phase

The beginning of the year 1997 marked the birth of the first social media website that can be actually be said to be website related to social media in the name of Six Degrees.

It derived its name from the “Six Degrees of Separation Theory and this website lasted for a span of 4 years i.e. from 1997 to 2001.

The basic purpose of this website was to allow people to make profiles and then  create a friend database with other users.

It also had some additional features as it also allowed the people who didn’t register as users to confirm friendship and also stay connected with the people this way.

This website marked a new era in the field of social media as after this the internet moved into the sphere of blogging and instant messages.

Social Media Evolution: The Second Phase

It is to be noted that the speed with which the internet grew was tremendous, by the year 2000, more than 100 million people were able to access the internet and the more it spread the more common it got.

Social media became a platform for people to meet discuss topics and what not but a huge push was yet to come which completely changed the way social media was perceived in those times.

Another development in the field of social media came with the first social media surge in the name of MySpace, .

It was the same as the previous website allowing people to meet by making profiles and making friends and can be said to be the inspiration for many such websites especially Facebook.

Many musicians have reported to use this website in order to promote their music. Another website in this field can be Linkedln, which is still to be working geared for the professionals who wanted to network with each other.

It is to be noted that while MySpace is a general social media site, Linkedln was and still is connected to and deals with more people who are more professional than personal.

Social Media Evolution: The Today

It was the year 2004, when Mark Zukerberg launched the world renowned and amongst the best social media websites named Facebook.

Facebook has since then acquired the role of a social media giant both in number of users and its marketing activities with over one billion users.

In 2006, Twitter, a service allowing users to tweet was launched keeping into account the popularity of the text messages. Twitter allows the users to tweet in 140 characters or less and now has over 500 million users.

This growth marked the rise of numerous social media websites providing services of some or the other kind. Some allowing the users to share pictures for example Flickr, Instagram, Photobucket.

This growth of social media lead to many things, this period not only saw the social media to gain widespread popularity but also also say that social media can be used for marketing as well.

Business via these social media platforms now included their social media addresses on the television commercials and social media icons were being devised and slowly with the passage of time it became impossible to imagine any business or brands with these social media icons and platforms.

Conclusion

Today theses platforms acquire a totally different role than being restricted to social connections, rather they form the way of business these days.

As it is also said that future cannot be seen and it is also impossible to know as to what the future time has stored in for social media, but it is very clear that this growth will not decline but only have a upward slope.

The more the communication level between human beings will develop, the more prevalent, social media gets. So with this growth, it will be very curious to see this growth of social media.