Only a decade ago, social media was little more than a budding trend. Although social sites like Friendster and MySpace that had a decent level of adoption, the population as a whole and businesses had not realised the potential of social media. Facebook was founded at 2004, Twitter appeared around 2005, but many saw it as pointless. LinkedIn was only a digital resume. And Google+ didn’t even come on the scene until 2011, followed later by Pinterest and other platforms.
By 2016, Social Media platforms connected 2.8bn people, more than 1/3 of the world population.
Among the social networks, Facebook has the biggest Social Media reach, followed by Chinese tech-company Tencent.
More than 50 billion of messages are sent through WhatsApp every day.
What’s the impact of Social media? As Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has said “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends”.
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Graphic source: Statista; cover image: Unsplash