The Evolution Of Social Media: How Did It All Begin?

In today’s world, social media is a major aspect of our lives. Studies have shown that, on average, we touch our phones around 2,600 times daily. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the average person had screen time of 7 hours a day.

In seven hours, we mostly scroll on social media, watch videos on YouTube, or watch movies on Netflix. We spend almost one-third of our day on social media, so it is interesting to discuss its evolution and social media’s impact on society.

In this article we will go through the following:

• The history of social media
• Rise of social media platforms
• Role of AI in Social Media
• Future of social media

The Early Days and Evolution of Social Media

The history of social media began in the early 2,000 when platforms like Myspace and Friendster entered the world. In simple words, these platforms were early versions of Facebook. Their main motive was to connect people so that they could build relationships or make friends online.

Friendster: Friendster was founded by Jonathan Abrams. It entered the market in 2003 and intended to connect people to build relationships and make friends.

The website was used to share photos, videos, and events via profiles same as Facebook, but back then Facebook did not exist.

Myspace: Myspace was created in 2003 by Entrepreneurs Tom Anderson and Chris Dewolfe. The platform was built so, music artists could access it and promote their work. However, it ended up being the same as Friendster, a social connecting platform.

Both platforms became popular because, in the early years, they allowed people to connect, share, and comment via profile, which was unique and became so popular. Nobody knew that these two platforms would create the history of social media.

The Rise of Facebook: The Mainstream Shift

The rise of social media platforms began in 2004 when Mark Zuckerberg launched the site Facebook. Initially, it was for Harvard students to connect, communicate, and share effectively. Facebook gained popularity quickly among students and people in 2006.

Before Facebook, there were social-connecting platforms like Friendster and Myspace, but they didn’t gain as much popularity as Facebook.

The reason behind it was, that Facebook was revolutionising the social media platforms enabling people to share statuses that could reach their connection. Its algorithm was designed to find people who you don’t know each other so you can make new connections as well. Which was unique nobody was doing it except Facebook.

Here are the following things that made Facebook so popular:

• You can share photos, videos, multimedia, and events on Facebook.
• It allowed people to build community and engage with them.
• From posts, people are gaining attention, content is abundant.
• Facebook was building real relationships among people.

These are the reasons why it became so popular, and this is how the rise of social media platforms began. Now, sharing features, likes, and hashtags have become fundamental to social media interaction.

Instagram, Snapchat, and the Age of Visual Content

In this Digital Era, people are consuming visual content on social media. Visual content is getting 150% more engagement compared to simple text-based content. The emotional connection that builds while watching visually excites people to watch.

As now high-quality content is being normalised, everyone has an effective camera on their smartphones. The shift towards visual-centric content is happening quickly.

Visual-centric content has reshaped social interactions by boasting engagements. Studies have shown people remember 80% of what they watch visually, 20% by written texts, and 10% by hearing.

Earlier, Influencers were primarily bloggers they gained popularity through their niche but as they grew they started shifting to visual-centric content to influence people and it worked very well.

People started watching influencers who were just like them, people started relating to influencers and the visual-centric content revolutionised the social media influence. It sparked trends and new marketing strategies.

TikTok and Short-Form Video Dominance

Vine was the first short-form video platform. Nobody knew this trend was going to dwindle humans’ attention spans. The rise of new forms of content took place in 2013 when Vine became quickly popular.

This platform was supporting the content 6 seconds long and the video was looped. Soon after, it raised many creators but could not stand long due to high competition and officially ended in 2017.

But TikTok took place, revolutionised the world with short-form video content, and reached two billion downloads.

As the craze for short-form video content grew, the market analyzed, and platforms like Instagram and YouTube launched shorts with the same concept of “for you,” where algorithms keep you hooked by showing you personalised content that you like. People get addicted. On these platforms, people continuously wait for what is next, which keeps them hooked and drains their attention span.

Studies show that these platforms provide relief to your mind but when you spend hours on it it becomes a drug for your mind.

In the 2000’s the average attention span of humans was 12 seconds, now it is 8 seconds, and the average attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds you can see why people cannot focus on their work because their attention span is degrading over time.

The Role of AI in Social Media Evolution

There is a big role of AI in social media by personalising customer experiences whether it is ad or feed AI is working on every aspect of social media.

Following are some roles of AI in social media evolution.

Curating Feeds: AI curates feeds by analyzing user preferences, interests, browsing history, and social media activity. To show you personalised content on your interests.

Personalised Ad: AI has increased the purchases from Ads by 31% just by using key demographic and behavioural data of a person’s social media posts, comments, likes, shares, and visits. So that AI can make personalised Ads to target a person in real time.

Chatbots: AI is also involved in our conversation while online inquiries for products. They use interactive AI to personalised recommendations for your queries by understanding your input and to make a more personalised touch by addressing the customers by their name.

Social Media Privacy Concerns and Ethical Challenges

Social media data privacy has become a primary concern because platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Twitter, and Linkedin have access to large amounts of data that scammers can misuse.

Here are the following social media privacy concerns:

Identity Concern: Your basic data on social media like usernames, addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers are enough for scammers to target you.

Sharing Loopholes: Sharing posts with your friends is also not secured when your friend reposts it other users can also see. So make sure to not share something private or important data.

Misinformation: The immense concern on social media is misinformation if it is violent then can evoke human emotions into heated conversation. Leading humans to be mislead with original information and believing in something that is false.

Social media platforms have content moderation guidelines but it takes time to get detected. So make sure to double-check the information on credible sources.

This is not the only concern there is a big issue called social media & surveillance advertising. Like Facebook which transfers users’ data to other companies so that they can make you last long on their platform and show you personalised ads so that you take monetizable action.

Your data like your friends, your likes and dislikes based on this they show you ads. If you want to get rid of this then the best thing is to use a VPN while surfing the internet it will prevent your actual data and location and you can also access blocked contents of any country.

Social Media and E-commerce Integration

E-commerce is far older than the Internet. Yeah, that’s true, it’s been 40 years since E-commerce started, at that time technology was not high-tech, back in the 1970s E-commerce was known as teleshopping and gradually Amazon became the first site for selling products online.

Now, the trend is taking place in social commerce platforms like Instagram and TikTok offering people a blend of entertainment with shopping, particularly their main consumers Gen Z. Studies have shown that the social media marketing trend is expected to reach $1.2 Trillion by 2025.

Instagram and TikTok are majorly driving those growths with frictionless shopping with the help of AI providing personalised experience and payment apps enabling one to purchase anything with few clicks.

Future Trends: What’s Next for Social Media?

Emerging technology such as AR/VR has so much potential in future that we can only imagine now, those imaginations are not possible yet but soon we can socialize with friends around the world, and we can interact with people in computer-generated immersive environments.

AR promises to create more detailed and immersive pictures. The future of AR/VR is going to revolutionise how we socialize and interact. These are going to bring the evolution of social media.

As we are seeing the rising popularity of private and nich platforms like clubhouse, rizzle, and classmate.com. They offer a tailored online experience where you can interact with people in your niche. This trend is building fundamental of how people connect online.

In July 2022, these platforms achieved 10 million weekly active users.

Conclusion: The Journey Continues

The evolution of social media has changed the way of learning, thinking, and socialising, it has come so far that we can purchase anything with some clicks while sitting on our couch, we can see the whole world on the digital screen.

Social media allows an individual to share their thought and raise their voice it’s a treasure if you know how to leverage it.

What do you think about how AR/VR going to affect our future, will it revolutionise or make people live like a slaves? Make sure to provide your opinion below in the comment box.

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