Social Media by the Numbers

Isn’t it hard to believe that social media has only been around since 1997? With extremely high users on Facebook and Instagram nowadays, it seems like if you aren’t on social media you do not exist.

Here is a brief look into how Social Media began, and the exponential growth it has taken in todays world. Did you know that the first social media site was called Six Degrees? It all started in 1997 and only lasted until 2001, but it was the beginning of it all when other successful social media platforms evolved from this idea like Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, XING and Facebook.

1997

Six Degrees was developed and started by CEO Andrew Weinreich and had around 3.5 Million users.

2000

The internet by now has over 100 million users and was pretty common for people to engage socially. As this time it was considered an “odd hobby” but people were still utilizing chat rooms for making friends, online dating and discussing important topics.

2003

In the early 2000’s MySpace was a hit, and was the place to go to setup a personal profile and make friends. MySpace was a huge marketplace for musicians as well, promoting their music through the website and have a huge reach of listeners. Unlike today’s social media networks, MySpace was a general social media site that was not geared toward any idea or specific demographic of people. For instance, LinkedIn started and still is today a network for professionals who want to network with each other. This unique quality is what made these social media grow to where they are today.

2005

Everyone knows this social network in which was launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook. Boasting with over a billion users, Facebook is the number one social media network used today. Originally, Facebook was only for Harvard students until Zuckerberg saw the potential of the network and released the service to the entire world in 2004. In 2006 the popularity of text messaging and SMS led Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Noah Glass and Evan Williams to create Twitter, which has over 500 millions users today.

2006 – Today

Since the start of Facebook and Twitter there have been at least 5 other social networks that are specific or unique in some way. Some other social networks that have evolved from Facebook and Twitter are:

• YouTube – 1.5 billion users
• Flickr – 90 Millions users
• Instagram – 800 Million users
• Pinterest – 200 Million users
• FourSquare
• Groupon
• WhatsApp – 900 Million Users
• Snapchat – 178 Million daily users
• Google+ – 111 Million Users
• Air BNB – 150 Million Users
• Periscope – 10 Million Users
• Reddit – 234 Million Users

Social Media for Business

Since social media is so popular and it seems like everyone is using the network, why not market your product or business? Facebook has become a great resource for expanding your online reach and can increase brand exposure exponentially. Because of the algorithms and huge amount of people within the network, businesses can target their audience extremely specific, and only send ads to that audience (getting the most bang for your buck). Here at Atilus we encourage our clients to take advantage of this new social world to increase profits and website traffic.