The Growth of Social Media & Where it's going

The Growth of Social Media

Many people remember that days of Bebo and Myspace, where we were fascinated with having our own little section on the internet to chat with friends and show off what we've been doing that day. This may have been seen as just a passing trend at the time but social media has exploded so much that it is part of  more than one billion peoples lives. Facebook is arguably the most mature of the top social networks which completely decimated the previous medias available, with Myspace now being a distant memory.

Back in 2004 Facebook only had about 1 million users. By 2011 the network had grown so large; its population was being compared to that of a country. Today, Facebook has more that 1 billion registers user and Mark Zuckerberg is still looking to get the other 5 billion of the world’s populations in social media.

From 2010 Twitter had a very steep growth and as the diagram shows above, from 2012 to 2013 Twitter is the highest growing social media of that time. Although there is a fear currently that the growth of Twitter is slowing down, with its shares dropping by 24% after this reported plateau in growth. Last year, Twitter averaged 241 million monthly users in the last quarter of the year, up just 3.8% on the previous quarter.

That represents a slowdown compared with a growth rate of 10% seen at the beginning of 2013. The company also reported a net loss of £396m for 2013, just three months after its flotation on the New York Stock Exchange.

Google+ saw the biggest growth of all in 2013, most like because of Google’s integration of Google+ into all associated services. If you have a Gmail account, you have a G+ profile. Most recently, Google integrated G+ in YouTube comments. Indeed, Google/Google+ is becoming one big super brand.

Looking at this diagram above it is clear to see that social media has been growing in vast amounts since the introduction of Facebook in 2004, with several new medias coming into play to try challenge Facebook at the top spot. Although the question lies, how long can this growth continue? As said above; Twitter has begun to plateau in regards to its growth and the can't always be a new influx of people wanting to get on the networking site, so therefore there will be a time where the growth has to slow down.... Right?

The Future of Social Media

There is the belief that in terms of marketing on social medias, this will become very hard as it looks as if the networking sites will begin to make companies 'pay to play'. The view is that in 2014, we’ll see increased pressure on companies of all sizes to pay to sponsor their posts to get more visibility, as getting consumers’ attention in social media becomes increasingly difficult, which will be hardest on small businesses that obviously have fewer resources than big brands. The theory behind this is the fact that Facebook has changed its news feed algorithm to hurt organic reach (The number of unique people who saw your post in News Feed or on your Page, including people who saw it from a story shared by a friend when they liked, commented on or shared your post, answered a question or responded to an event). Twitter is a public company that must drive revenues and Google+ has introduced ads.

Expert Dan Thornton, Managing Director of TheWayoftheWeb Ltd said: Social Media will continue to grow as a sales and customer service tool, although the impact on marketing may become less as established social networks make changes to encourage paid promotion. At the same time, small businesses will need to be quicker to experiment and embrace new platforms to make an impact.

Looking at everything in this blog and it is obvious that social media is growing and will continue to grow, in terms of marketing and in terms of everyday life. It is part of everyday life now and eventually there will be no escaping it and as said in the video, the people who do choose to ignore this growth in social media and try to steer clear of it, will be left behind and probably will inevitably have to get on board with it which we all know will therefore help it to grow even more.