The Evolution of Social Media

Social Media has been in the works since the late 70s starting with things like newsgroups and early chat rooms. Social Media started to become more popular in 2001 with the introduction of more chat applications and one of the earliest blog platforms Livejournal.

After this there was a large amount of innovation in the industry such as the creation of Wikipedia, and Friendster, Myspace and Facebook following that in 2004 and then twitter in 2006. Social Media popularity on mobile devices has spiked in recent years with 36% of mobile users having a messaging app installed on their smart phone in the year 2015 and almost half (49%) of people ages between 18 - 29 use their smart phone for instant messaging.

Social media has become the social norm now days and almost everyone is using it, including large companies, young kids and even older generations. Even augmented reality is increasing in popularity with the release of tech like Google Glass, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Google Cardboard.

Social media has even changed the way businesses advertise, instead of spending thousands on a TV advert or a bill board advert they can spend far less money on an advertisement spot on a social media site and get a lot more exposure this way as well and it also benefits smaller companies that don't have as much money and it can really get them off the ground and make it big in the world. But it also has it's down sides with sites being over saturated with advertisements and sometimes even taking up more space on the site than the actual content on the website. 

Kevin Crawford