The Evolution of Social Media 2004 - 2014

New media in itself is a huge step forward for all media outlets. The ways of communicating something to the masses are constantly growing and evolving. As a media student, it is important to stay up to date with the tools and their evolution.

With that said, social media is a rapid growing source for the entire global population to interact with. People have moved from just being members of the audience, to being senders as well. One of the biggest changes is the shift to having citizen journalism.

Here is the infographic on the “Evolution of Social Media” between the years 2004 – 2014. (I know, I’m getting a obsessive with my recent use of infographics)

In 10 years, Flickr managed to become one of the most used, and best-known photo-sharing websites to date. It offers advanced and powerful features for the users. The Flickr community is active and engaged by sharing and exploring images. Users on Flickr are able to share hundreds of their own photos without paying any fees.

In 2005 YouTube was launched, and now it’s the go to source for videos! More people are becoming famous through YouTube.

There have been 6 billion hours of video watched per month, and 100 hours of video uploaded per minute.

There are various different types of social media outlets that constantly keep popping up.

There are

·      Different blogging websites – Blogger

·      Different blogging publishing tools – Wordpress

·      Different micro-blogging websites – Twitter, Pinterest

Each of these new outlets give more and more ways for people to share their touch with the rest of the world while viewing other people’s output to the public.

I personally love Pinterest. At first, I wasn’t sure how to use it at all, and it confused me. A few years later, and I found that I had folders of images that I liked. That is basically what offers, an online folder system. Through pinterest, you choose to follow your interests and upload different images to categorized “boards”. These images are also linked to the website you found them on, which is an added plus in the Pinterest features.

For example, let’s say you have a recipe board on Pinterest. One day you’re browsing through the internet looking for recipes for whatever you’re planning on making one day. Then you find an awesome recipe for something you want to try. You could pin the image from that website to your recipe board. Then from anywhere, if you click on the image that you pinned on Pinterest, it will redirect you to the website with the recipe on it.

This works for all kinds of things, from shopping to fitness tips to quotes.  You can find anything on Pinterest. The images are also constantly increasing, adding more and more options as time continues.

In 2014 Pinterest had 40 million active users! Keep in mind it was launched in 2011 (check posted infographic). Gotta admit, that is pretty awesome.

But what’s really awesome is the evolution of Instagram! It was launched in 2012. In two years it had 200 million active users, 50 million photos posted per day, and 1.6 billion daily likes. That is insane!

Even finding jobs has evolved through social media. LinkedIn, for example, is a business-oriented social service. It helps employees search for employers and vice versa. You could even use it as a resume. Through LinkedIn you create business connections with all kinds of people.

So it’s definitely important to know what’s happening to the tools that people use when it comes to new media. Social Media is definitely something that we, as media students, should be working hard to stay up to date with.

As you can clearly see from the infographic, the numbers for these sites and new applications are booming!