The History of Social Media (Part 2)
Facebook began in early 2004 as a Harvard only social media platform (Cassidy, 2006), you could only sign up if you had a Harvard university email address. Beginning in September 2005, Facebook expanded to include high school students, professionals inside corporate networks, and, eventually everyone (Boyd & Ellison, 2008) to grow to be the most used social media platform at present. It wasn’t until 2006, when Facebook first started generating revenue from ads, with a strategic partnership with Microsoft, exclusively only allowing Microsoft to advertise via banner ads. Only in 2007, Facebook introduced ads specific to business pages, and consequently in 2009 it followed a self service advertisement program that allowed events and pages to target specific demographics (Kessler, 2011) contributing to ad revenues of $764 million in the same year. Unlike other social media platforms, Facebook users are unable to make their full profiles public to all users, a feature that has differentiated Facebook from leading competitor at the time MySpace, allowing greater privacy of user information. This was consequently important during the digital age, were most user information is obtainable online.
In order to maintain a sophisticated level of software for advertisement users compared to rival software and program competitors, Facebook introduced social context metrics to its performance advertising analytics in 2010, which saw ad revenue double, revenue continuing to grow and consequently peaking in the second quarter of 2013 to reach $1.8 billion making Facebook the most popular social media platform valued at $104.12 billion (Wilhelm, 2013).
Twitter slowly entered the market in 2006, a free micro blogging service founded by Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone (Mashable, 2013), the service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 500 million registered users as of 2012, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day (Lunden, 2012). In 2010, Twitter introduced advertising in the form of promoted tweets, trends and accounts, totalling ad revenue to $44.6 million (Min, 2013).
Compared to competitor social media sites such as Facebook, Google+, etc, Twitters unique selling point (USP) for users, is their simplicity in which their tweets are restricted to; 140 characters, which consequently allows shorter, more valuable forms of communication between users. They also offer a verified symbol which signifies an authentic celebrity or corporate user account, an option which currently wasn’t at the time available to companies or celebrities on competitor social media platforms. This consequently appealed to the mass market, meaning that users can follow their favourite celebrities knowing they are the ones ‘tweeting’, similar to the policy MySpace adopted, by attracting fans from popular musicians, Twitter merely applied this to the mass market and tried to appeal its target market to global celebrities.
A feature of Twitters success is that it comes with lots of optional add-ons. Twitter allows programmers to write third party applications that anyone can use and extend the power of the service (Comm, 2010), which has aided in the consistent growth the company has experienced since launching in 2006. In 2011, Twitter had progressed to nearly triple their ad revenue from $139.5 million in the space of two years to $582.8 million in 2013 (Min, 2013).
With the potential for mass global appeal, it was only a matter of time before American Multinational Corporation Google entered the social media market with their specially engineered social media platform Google+ in June 2011. Their USP within the social media platform marketplace is their Google Circles feature and also the fact that they don’t allow paid marketing opportunities. However this is their downfall as they have no revenue stream to speak of through Google+ and unfortunately for Google, social media marketers don’t quite view Google+, as a hotbed for marketing opportunities (Boulton, 2011) discouraging engagement and arguably stalling the rapid growth competitors Facebook & Twitter have experienced.
Google+ was promoted internally throughout their organisation, consequently identifying a staggering 73.7% of Google+ users as males (O’Dell, 2011b). Hardy (2011) explains that in order to get hundreds of millions of followers, Google+ need to attract more women, non-technology people, and older people. Google launched the service through its workforce, launched in 43 languages, an impressive geographical and linguistic reach, but it did so through Google employees, who are mostly young male software engineers which consequently appeals to a target market with similar characteristics, “guys who write a lot of code tend to know more guys than women,” (Hardy, 2011).
Social media is taking the world by storm, especially in this new ‘digital age’ we are currently experiencing, which is a relatively new form of media. Facebook is the market leader with a reported 1.11 billion people using the site each month, recorded at the end of March 2013 (The Associated Press, 2013), consequently dominating the market share with 72.4% of the global social media presence, posing the most popular amongst digital marketers and businesses.
In 2008, companies invested more than $1.54 billion for the implementation and support of social media communications, emphasising brand integration with social media and recognising the importance involved for a business’s marketing communications. This growth in social media seems unlimited so far (Trusov et al., 2009), as the investments in social media are expected to increase to more than three billion dollars per year by 2014 (Kozinets et al., 2010) along with the total amount of income generated from social media sites from advertising and social gaming amounting to $16.9 billion (Miller, 2012).
References Available on Request
By Chris Kyriacou