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What is social media?
Social media is a platform that helps us to stay connected with people who are important to us. It allows us to share our ideas, thoughts, emotions and everything else that could come to our minds. At the same time, we can easily connect with other people all over the world and build friendships, relationships and learn new things from them.
It’s very easy to use – nowadays everyone knows how to use social networks. You don’t have to do anything special to use social media. You don’t need any special skills. All you need is a smartphone and the ability to send messages, photos, videos or audio clips.
It’s everywhere – no one can escape social media nowadays. It’s in our phones, tablets and computers and it is one of the most popular uses in the world. There are thousands of social media platforms and apps that allow us to connect with other users from all over the world.
Let’s see some history and unknown facts of the list of social media platforms for business.
Facebook was founded in 2004 by the Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg. The next year, he created Facebook.com. The first name for this social network was Facemash. In 2006, Facebook was opened for everyone worldwide. Since then, it has been growing up rapidly. In 2011, Facebook had more than 500 million active users in a single month and became one of the most visited sites in the world.
The idea for Facebook came up when Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard University. He wanted to create an online system where students could choose their own pictures and compare them to others’ pictures. At that time, there were already some other social networks like MySpace. Mark Zuckerberg settled on the name “Facebook” which he thought was a catchy combination of “book” (as in the first book ever, which is from Facebook) and “book” (as in a person’s “book” of friends).
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its user to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length, displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.
While creating Twitter as a side project, Dorsey’s original application name was twttr, an idea that stemmed from Odeo and the short status messages people would post on that network. In early 2006, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams were working with Odeo, a company that produced technology allowing users to broadcast short audio messages through a public website. The idea was further developed into a separate company called Obvious Corporation, which then spun out into Twitter Inc., with Dorsey serving as Executive Chairman of Twitter and Williams serving as CEO.
Nowadays you can find and follow famous people from any country on Instagram. Every day there are new photos and people likes them, tagging friends, sharing photos on Facebook or Twitter. Every day, the daily usage of Instagram is growing up very quickly. The question “What is Instagram?” is very popular even in countries where Instagram is not available for use. The history of Instagram is the story of the brightest minds and the young men who decided to change the world of humanity.
Instagram is now officially part of Facebook. The popular photo-sharing app was bought for close to $1 billion by the social media giant. Before Facebook, Instagram was a small startup company that had only 13 employees. Today, we will tell you the history of Instagram and how it began.
Instagram is probably the most famous social platform that is developed and launched in 2010. It’s a mobile app and social networking service used for capturing and sharing pictures and short videos. April 9, 2015, marked the 5-year anniversary of Instagram. So far we’ve seen more than 100 million accounts created on Instagram.
The monthly active users’ count has increased from 8 million to 200M in just 5 years.
Also, the number of posts on Instagram has reached 30 billion!
Let’s take a look at the history of Instagram.
Founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger (former employees of the company Nextstop), Instagram was launched in 2010 as a free photo-sharing application for iOS devices. At that time, it only allowed users to post square photos lacking filters and other effects found in the current version of the app. After 13 months since its launch, Instagram was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion in cash and stock.
Youtube
What is Youtube and how it begins?
YouTube is one of the world’s most viewed websites. It makes sense that the question “what is YouTube?” has been on the mind of many people out there. YouTube went through many transitions since its birth in 2005. It first started as a video-sharing site where users can upload their videos. While it was able to get the attention of many people, the platform was not as interactive as it should be.
YouTube had come a long way since then, although many people weren’t satisfied with the current state of the website. It was in desperate need of change – a change that will make the website more interactive and user-friendly.
The current YouTube platform has an extremely clean and simple layout. It allows its users to watch, create, and share videos conveniently. The new platform also introduced some features that make it a lot easier for users to interact with fellow YouTube users and advertisers alike.
YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, three former PayPal employees who had worked together at another company called eGroups. Chen and Karim studied science at UC San Diego; Hurley studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
The year was 2005, about 14 years ago. It was the start of a new era when a new video sharing site named YouTube showed up on the internet and shook the world. The website became one of the most-visited sites in the world. There were only three people in their team when it was initially launched. They started this site as a project for their studies.
It has come a long way since its humble beginnings. This year, it is 14 years old. It has made a lot of changes to its homepage design since its inception as well as for its app.
Pinterest is one of the most popular social networks, so there are lots of articles and blogs about it, but do you already know how Pinterest look like in the beginning?
Well, here is the answer: In 2009 Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp, and Paul Sciarra started working on a new product that will help to “save interesting products and style ideas” and they called it “Pin-It.me”.
As a result, two months later the company filed the application for a trademark under Pin-It.me.
In 2011 Pinterest finally launched and now it’s one of the biggest social networks with more than 100 million users. No wonder that the founders of Pinterest were invited to participate in the YC (Y Combinator) Annual dinner on May 19.
The founders are passionate about what they do for sure since in 2010 they responded to a request from another company when they tried to register “Pin-It.
TikTok
TikTok or Douyin is local audio and video-based social media app for mobile phones. It’s owned by the Chinese technology company ByteDance. This app was initially launched in China in 2016. In 2017, it was launched in India and Vietnam. In 2018, TikTok was released in Brazil and Mexico. This app was renamed Douyin to Tiktok in 2018. After introducing this app in many countries, it has become immensely popular among users all over the world.
Tiktok is basically used for social media entertainment like musical.ly Inc. This app has various features which are used to share media with the help of different filters on the video shooting mode. These features help users to add different effects during video shooting like photo editing, stickers, text, different modes of video shooting, applying filters during post-shooting activities, adding background music to videos, using different stickers within video posts etc.
WhatsApp is a mobile messaging application for smartphones. It uses the Internet to send text messages, images, video and voice recordings to other users using standard cellular mobile numbers. The application runs on iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia Symbian and Windows smartphones.
It was created in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, both former employees of Yahoo! Inc., and is currently operated by Facebook.
The application was developed as part of the ‘Phone Factor’ project of Kakao Corp., a South Korea – based telecommunications company.
In February 2014 Facebook acquired WhatsApp for US$19 billion in cash and stock.
This acquisition was chiefly due to its 500 million users worldwide and the service is considered as a key piece of software in Facebook’s mobile strategy.
The app only lasted two years without any marketing or promotions spent on it. It got viral because of its user-friendly interface and became one of the most popular IM apps of all time.
On May 5, 2002, Reid Hoffman launched the business social networking site LinkedIn.
At that time, it was difficult for professionals to find jobs and business opportunities online. Most of the professionals were using tools like resumes and corporate websites for connecting with the organizations and other professionals.
The idea came to him when he designed his profile on the other job site Monster.com. He thought that it would be more productive if he had a professional network that he can use to get jobs and connect with people who might make a good impression on the employers.
The name LinkedIn is coined from “Linked” and “In”, which stands for “Linked In”. It was a play on verbs ‘linked’ and ‘in’. The idea behind it was to make a website that would be helpful for people to connect with each other, in a similar way like “linked” different pieces of information on the internet.
Reddit is an entertainment, social networking service and news website where registered community members can submit content such as text posts or direct links. It is organized into areas of interest called “subreddits”.
Reddit was founded by University of Virginia roommates and former Boston College roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005. Condé Nast Publications acquired the site in October 2006. Reddit became a direct subsidiary of Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications, in September 2011. As of August 2012, Reddit operates as an independent entity, although Advance is still its largest shareholder.
The site is a collection of entries submitted by its registered users, essentially a bulletin board system. The name “Reddit” is a play-on-words with the phrase “read it”, i.e., “I read it on Reddit.
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