Social networks are part of our daily lives.  Appearing in the early 2000s with Myspace, social networks on the Internet have grown exponentially and revolutionized the way people communicate and express their ideas over the years.

Currently, the number of social media users is 4.9 billion globally, with Facebook being the biggest social media platform with 2.91 billion users. The global base of social media users is expected to reach 5.85 billion by 2027.

The appearance of social media and its revolution as we know them now is a set of innovations and events. These virtual communities changed how ideas are exchanged among people, businesses, and brands. That is why it is very important to understand the rise of social networks to make the most of them.

So here’s an explanation of the history of social media, from the beginning to date!

Social media Background

To understand the rise of social networks, let’s look at the background. 

ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), a primitive American computer network, was one of the precursors in the history of the Internet itself, from which the World Wide Web emerged.

During the Cold War, ARPANET linked different institutes, universities, and military organizations to facilitate the flow of confidential information and defend the country from Soviet attacks. Thanks to their efforts, the first email was sent in 1971, followed by the start of the first free online digital library, Project Gutenberg, in the following year. Finally, this private exchange network went public in 1991, starting the Internet as we know it today.

Online communities emerged, enabling the flow of information and membership. Some direct antecedents to social networks, like GeoCities and Tripod, introduced personalized web pages organized into “neighborhoods.”

Origin of social networks

The meteoric rise of social media occurred between 1997 and 2001. The discussion forums proposed a slower mode of exchange in writing.

The birth of social networks is very recent. If it is often attributed to the birth of Facebook in 2004, it is false since the first one was born in 1997: this is the case of Six Degrees, Weblog, and Hotmail, the first networking network. 

6 Degrees was one of the first social network projects that aspired to put into practice the supposed theory of the 6 degrees of separation.

This site, launched in 1997, failed. However, those first community projects served as the basis for future proposals.

The year 1998 marked the arrival of Google and the birth of “peer to peer” with Napster, and everything accelerated from there. Community platforms like BlackPlanet, AsianAvenue, and MiGente appeared. In 2001, Ryze.com, the first professional social network, appeared, but it failed to experience the success of its competitor, LinkedIn.

In 2002, Friendster was created as a social network for video game lovers, followed by MySpace and LinkedIn in 2003, business-oriented and professional networks. Many of the old social networks disappeared while LinkedIn had an enormous impact on the business world, and its number of users continued to grow. In 2008, LinkedIn had over 25 million users, a figure that has reached 600 million today.

The Explosion of Social Networks: 2002 – 2006 

From 2002, social networks continued to develop considerably. 2004 marked the arrival of the social network par excellence, Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, a university student from Harvard University, created Facebook. Zuckerberg initially created Facemash, a virtual place for Harvard students to connect and share opinions, for which he was expelled from the university.

However, the virtual space he made continued to evolve and grow to what is known today as Facebook, the biggest social media platform with 2.96 billion users globally.

2005 was when the audio-visual platform YouTube emerged due to the efforts of three friends, Chad Hurley, Jawn Karim, and Steve Chen. Today, YouTube is the second biggest social media with 2.5 billion active users.

2006 sees the arrival of Twitter, the microblogging social network. It was, undoubtedly, the communication revolution, the “short burst of inconsequential information” in 140 characters, which is said to tweet. Today, Twitter has 353.90 million users worldwide. Now “X” and owned by Elon Musk.

The following years marked a continuous growth and democratization of social networks.

2006 to Today: Record-Breaking Growth of Social Networks

The following years witnessed the emergence of WhatsApp in 2009 and Instagram in 2010, the third and fourth biggest social media platform      today. 

Today, these platforms have two billion (Whatsapp) and 1.39 billion (Instagram) active users, respectively.

Whatsapp has become the biggest messaging mode and is above applications like Facebook Messenger, while Instagram, which is more focused on the new generations, has become the largest photography network.

In the following years:

• Pinterest emerged in 2011 (445 million users today)
• Google+, the online giant, was created in 2011 (2 billion users today)
• Twitch, the gamers’ reference platform, was created in 2011 (over 140 million users today)
• TikTok, a social media platform for adolescents, emerged in 2016 (834.3 million users today)

Those numbers make your head spin, don’t they? We don’t necessarily realize it, but we grab our smartphones and spend hours scrolling through our favorite social media networks.

Conclusion!

Today social networks have become a way to get news in real-time, a wide and globalized network to find work, and above all, a place to do business, gain notoriety, and expand reach.

Businesses and individuals have seen the importance and reach of social media since its inception and must address them smartly to stay in the game. Many premature entrepreneurs and companies that jumped into social networks to promote their professional profiles and business promotion led to the development of social media marketing.

Learn more about the importance of your social media presence!