Social Media and how it has grown in the last 10 years.

Social Media and how it has grown in the last 10 years by Jason Kay

We are now in the age of Social Media and my how it has grown in 10 years. As a business if you aren’t on one of these sites you are missing out on serious traffic and a lot of opportunities to market your products

Take a look back in 2005, with YouTube just getting off the ground, MySpace was the most popular social site, Facebook was only in America and limited to College and High School Students and Twitter wasn’t even a twinkle in the internet’s eye. Fast forward 10 years and Google owns YouTube and is the largest video sharing site in the world, Facebook is used by nearly 1 billion users worldwide and MySpace is no longer in existence!

So how has a decade changed everything? Well it started with Facebook adding the “News Feed”. Highly controversial at the time but is now imitated by nearly all social media platforms! Before all you could do is visit a friends profile and leave a comment, but with the addition of the time line you could now view what your friends were up to, air your opinions to your friends and as time went by like and share these to other friends. In the last few years the addition of being able to start a new group was where the innovation for Companies began! This began the change for marketing. With companies able to create a business pages and market their products to thousands of people who would see their products etc every day was brilliant and now more than 25 million small businesses are using Facebook to market themselves. With the more recent edition of Facebook advertising and boosting posts to a relevant demographic you can see why Facebook is the perfect place for marketers and businesses.

Now, with the boom of Facebook came the boom of Twitter in 2006. With a timeline as well but subjected to no more the 140 characters per post it gave the writer the challenge to create posts that were more direct. With ease of following massive amounts of people it has appealed to celebrities who are able to air their views while at the same time able to not be bombarded with Direct Messages and security functions to only get notified from relevant people. With 75 million monthly unique visitors, Twitter also gave marketers an easier way to reach a larger audience and at the time was a good way to interact with other businesses. Very appealing to B2B companies who don’t see a benefit of Facebook. With only minor cosmetic updates to Twitter over the last 10 years, not much has changed for twitter and it doesn’t need to. It’s growing and that’s about it.

YouTube has grown exponentially over the last 10 years. Boasting the highest trafficked site on the internet, you can see why Google fought to buy YouTube. From personal funny videos to sports highlights and cover songs to helpful tips, YouTube is the place to get your 60 seconds of fame. With people fighting to get the most views, YouTube has 1.7 billion unique user visits per month. Being that it is free and giving Companies the chance to put video advertisements without paying for TV time, it was quickly snapped up by marketers to start marketing their business on YouTube online. YouTube saw a market in this and like Facebook gave businesses the chance to add video advertisements to certain demographics but with a twist. Going on Google’s Pence per Click (PPC) idea, charges your video ads in the same way BUT it gives the challenge to google to get people to watch the video and hit the right people, and the way they do this is that if the ad is skipped before 30seconds is up then you do not pay for that ad. Giving Google the challenge to hit the correct demographic that will use the business. But, with Facebook closing in on the unique user visits, what are YouTube going to do to stop this from happening?

Now the newest, LinkedIn. Still, in my view, in its juvenile stages, LinkedIn is growing fast but still needs tweaking to make it a bit more user friendly. A good way to connect with other professionals, look for jobs and market your business to the right people within other businesses, it is the dream site for marketing departments in all companies. With a lot to do to update it and make it more user friendly, we can predict LinkedIn to grow and be a superpower in the social media world.

With other Social Media platforms popping up everywhere, like, Pintrest, Instagram, Google plus, you can guarantee in 5 years I will be talking about the growth of another platform.

We can now see the massive growth of Social Media in the last 10 years, what does the next 10 years hold? It’s going to be exciting times for marketers like myself and I sure am looking forward to seeing where we are going to be in a decade.

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