Wednesday, 13 May 2015

Social Media Evolution

Social media is a big part of our every day lives. People use social media all the time! People also use social media for anything imaginable. Now people will go to their social media accounts for personal reasons, professional reasons, and even for extra knowledge.

Social media doesn’t only affect the consumers but also senders of information. Many news outlets and companies have social media accounts to market their stuff and interact with the public.

In class, we were given an infographic on how social media changed in a 10 year period – from 2004 to 2014.



Flickr is a major photo sharing website. It offers advanced features for the users to play with when they share their photos. In 10 years it grew and became the world’s most used photo-sharing website.

People now have the option to use Flickr as a portfolio of their photography.

YouTube is known to be the world’s best video sharing website. There are thousands of videos uploaded every day. The website was launched ten years ago in 2005 and has exploded ever since. Today there are 6 billion hours watched per month on YouTube.
People have the option to share and upload their own videos, and as of 2014, 100 videos were uploaded per minute!

Apart from social media, a major change that can be noticed is in the journalistic world. Now there are citizen journalists who take to online media to publish whatever they want. They use certain kinds of sites that are designed for blogging purposes.

Blogger, is an example of a blogging website. People can use blogger as a personal diary, a journal, or whatever else they have in mind.

Wordpress is another website that people have blogs on. But it is a website that offers blogging publishing tools that blogger does not offer. There are also different accounts on wordpress – free and premium. Paid account users have the option of having their own domain and using the wordpress tools to design their own blog-styled website.

There are also micro-blogging websites. An example of one is twitter. People just tweet whatever they want, whether it is news, personal feelings, communicating with others, or even advertising.

Each channel has different ways that people can communicate and get involved in the world of media.

There are so many different social media aspects that keep changing over the years, and new ones keep popping up at every corner.

Instagram is a more recent social media application that people use to share photos. I have even seen dentists using instagram to advertise their personal clinics! In the year 2014 it was registered that there were 60 million photos uploaded per day along with 1.6 billion likes per day!

Instagram users keep increasing along with the reasons behind accounts. Many accounts for online shopping have also emerged, along with fashion updates and anything else. It isn’t just a typical “photo sharing application” for people to use. People have adapted the application to suit their individual needs, or the needs of their company.

Pinterest is an example of a microblogging website that has changed the way that people file and organize different ideas. Pinterest takes the form of having different boards for people to “pin” images to. Each image can be linekd to an external site. This makes it easy for users to find things they would like to buy from clothes to games to household items.

There are also recipes on pinterest. People could pin images of delicious food plates and if they click on the picture they will be sent to the website with the recipe and instructions on how to cook the meal.


These are just a few examples of social media applications and channels that have grown a lot over the years. In a few years time the numbers will have increased exponentially, and new outlets will be added to the list.

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