• New and more advanced social media platforms are created every year with more interesting things that can be offered to internet users.
• There are so many known and followed social media platforms like Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.
• In 1978, the first social media was created. Bulletin Board System (BBS) was created by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess to announce meeting and sharing information by posting it on BBS.
• 1995 was the year for personal websites. After internet (WWW) launched and loved by many people, Geocities was launched by Beverly Hills Internet (BHI).
• Early social media service that appeared in 1997 was SixDegrees. SixDegrees used by 1 million users, let its users to create profile and list of friends.
• 1999 was a year for Blogger and Live journal. Users could write, share and communicate with friends by using their own blog or journal.
• Friendster a social networking group was launched in 2002. It let users to create profile and virtual connection with people around the world.
• Myspace, LinkedIn and WordPress launched in the same year, 2003. Most of Myspace users were musician and band. WordPress was created to be used as open-source content management system. And LinkedIn was business-oriented social networking.
• In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched “Facebook”. In the beginning, Facebook was created as social networking for college students.
• YouTube was launched in 2005, founded by the former employees of PayPal Jawed Karim, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. It is a social sharing that let users freely upload and share a video.
• Twitter is a social networking and microblogging website launched in 2006.
• In 2011, Google launched new product of social networking named Google plus (Google+). Google plus let you have a video chat (hangout) and exchange information.
• In 2012, Pinterest, the first social scrapbooking that gained 10 million users faster in history launched.
• Today there are around 2.46 billion people on social media.
• Nearly 90 percent of companies with revenues between $100 million and $1 billion are already using Augmented reality (AR) as part of their business.
• Social Media Marketing (SMM) report says, more than 65% of businesses are on social media to increase leads.
• In 2018, 40.2% of ads that the masses had seen were digital.
• Implemented in 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to protect the data and privacy of individuals in the European area.
• The European Union also came up with a legislative framework: Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II).
• Tools like Salesforce DMP or Data Studio allow companies to collect valuable data about their consumers – especially about millennials.