Social media is an expanding ecosystem of websites, applications, platforms, and electronic devices that allow people to converse and communicate mutually. It\u2019s a digital galaxy where users create online communities to share information, exchange ideas, and circulate personal messages.<\/p>\n
Online communities took the lead in encouraging the social networking of individuals, groups, and institutions. It was the beginning of the modern \u201cICE\u201d age, paving the way for the Information, Communication, and Entertainment explosion.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The potential struck businesses for promoting brands and services on various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If companies could share content tailor-made for specific audiences using different platforms, they could create brand awareness and boost customer conversions on a mega scale. Social media marketing was taking wings.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Around 90 percent of marketing executives consider social media to be a key component of marketing strategies. Studying the evolution of social media gives us a better perspective on how successful businesses leverage technology for research, data analytics, brand imaging, lead generation, and customer retention to stimulate e-commerce.<\/span><\/p>\n American computer engineer Ray Tomlinson successfully sends an electronic message (world\u2019s first email) from one computer to another in Cambridge, Massachusetts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n University student Eric Thomas invents Listserv, the world\u2019s first attempt at automating a mailing list that could add and remove subscribers. It could template and automatically forward a message to all the members on the list.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Finnish IT professional, Jarkko Oikarinen, creates the IRC (Internet Relay Chat), a protocol that enables more than two users to exchange text messages over the internet in real-time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n American entrepreneur, Andrew Weinreich, launches Sixdegrees.com, the first-ever social networking site that could profile friends, family, and acquaintances, and forge friendships among users. At its peak, the site was hosting a million users. It would be years before the internet could match the infrastructural needs of expanding social networks.<\/p>\n Canadian computer programmer Jonathan Abrams became the pioneer of modern social media by launching Friendster, a U.S. social networking site. The site\u2019s USP was that the network would continue to expand from friends to friends-of-friends. Users could share pictures, videos, messages, and comments. Active today, Friendster has a subscriber base exceeding 90 million, mostly of Asian origin.<\/p>\n The business fraternity enters social media with a bang through LinkedIn, a networking service that gets employers and job seekers to post their profiles and resumes to make themselves visible to recruiters and other professionals.<\/p>\n When Mark Zuckerberg and fellow students got together to create the Harvard-exclusive social network for college students, nobody thought that <\/span>Facebook<\/span><\/a> would grow as a network connecting 2.5 billion people. The USP was that users could write messages on another\u2019s wall and tweak visibility through privacy settings like \u201conly friends\u201d \u201cfriends of friends\u201d or \u201ceveryone.\u201d Content sharing, instant messaging, live chat, and other innovations grew Facebook\u2019s impressive array of features.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The creation of YouTube by a group of ex PayPal employees was a revolution of sorts in the history of social media because video hosting and sharing became a reality for millions of netizens. You could watch, upload, download, and embed video links in online blogs, forums, and networks.<\/p>\n Twitter arrives on the scene, introducing hashtags for highlighting trends and topics and popularizing microblogging (sharing information in snippets).<\/p>\n If Facebook networks you to family, friends, and acquaintances known mainly to you, <\/span>Twitter<\/span><\/a> networks you to a broader community of known and unknown\u00a0 individuals through news, ideas, and trending topics.<\/span><\/p>\n Whatsapp triggers a revolution in social media networking by connecting mobile users through text messaging, voice calls, video calls, and through the sharing of images, documents, and user location. In 2019, more than 1.5 billion users in 180 nations are enjoying WhatsApp\u2019s features free without annoying ads.<\/p>\n Over the past five decades, we\u2019ve seen the rise of social media and the escalation of social networking among communities and businesses.<\/p>\n Marketing was shifting from the era of mass production and product differentiation phase, to arrive in the modern age of personalization of products and services targeting specific audiences.<\/p>\n The technology was the catalyst propelling the evolution of social media marketing. Let\u2019s see how technology became the social media marketing enabler of the revolutionary kind.<\/p>\n In the 1980s, when computers were evolving, and desktop publishing was in its infancy, there was a surge in the popularity of print marketing. Following the introduction of the mass browser, Netscape Navigator, internet usage saw user base increasing phenomenally to 70 million netizens. The mass adoption of the net and the <\/span>growth of social media had a cataclysmic impact on marketing<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The 1990s saw the growth of email, the creation of search engines like Yahoo and Google, and the establishment of e-commerce sites such as Amazon and eBay, which brought transformative changes in marketing.<\/p>\n Print advertisements, telephonic sales, TV commercials, and radio jingles were prevalent. Yet, email steadily grew as an outbound marketing tool. Search engines became the fountainhead of information on products and services, making everything accessible from the comfort of one\u2019s home.<\/p>\n Search engine optimization took the driving seat with keyword stuffing, meta-tagging, and backlinks for escalating search rankings. Another critical marketing development was the \u201cserver push\u201d capability of the Netscape browser, which made it easier to render documents, spreadsheets, and images. The marketer\u2019s quest for promoting product visibility was finding fruition.<\/p>\n As search engines evolved, the focus shifted towards more sophisticated techniques, including\u00a0content strategy for SEO<\/a>\u00a0and user experience optimization. These advancements highlighted the importance of high-quality content, targeted keyword usage, and strategic backlinks. Integrating diverse strategies such as social media marketing and email campaigns became essential to create a holistic approach to digital marketing.<\/p>\nSocial Media: Tracing its Evolutionary History<\/b><\/h2>\n
1971: Digital transmission of messages becomes reality<\/span><\/h3>\n
1986: Automation of a subscriber list expands the reach of a message\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n
1988: World\u2019s first chat network becomes operational<\/span><\/h3>\n
1997:\u00a0 World\u2019s first social networking service comes into being<\/span><\/h3>\n
2002: First wave of modernization impacts social networking services<\/span><\/h3>\n
2003: Social networking services target businesses\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n
2004 to 2008: Harvard students\u2019 brainwave churns the social media ferment<\/span><\/h3>\n
2005: Online video streaming becomes integral to social networking<\/span><\/h3>\n
2006: Microblogging weds social networking to create the \u201cSMS of the internet\u201d<\/span><\/h3>\n
2009: Social media networking penetrates the community of mobile users<\/span><\/h3>\n
Evolving social media marketing was powering the business growth engine<\/b><\/h2>\n
The advent of the internet triggers a paradigm shift from\u00a0 print marketing to digital marketing<\/b><\/h3>\n
Print marketing domination ends<\/span><\/h4>\n
Growth of email, search engines, and e-commerce stores<\/span><\/h4>\n
The beginning of search engine optimization (SEO)<\/span><\/h4>\n