Social media as we know it today first begin in the early 2000s, with LinkedIn and MySpace both launching in 2003. LinkedIn is now used by 347 million people to make career-based connections and perform job searches, while MySpace has reinvented itself as a social networking site targeted to musicians and bands.

Facebook still leads the way

Facebook was created in 2004, but was not opened out to the public until 2007. Since then it has continued to lead the way in the social media world, and currently has over 1.4 billion active users. That’s around 20% of the world’s population, so it’s no wonder that it feels like everyone you know has a profile on the site!

Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, has made the site work thanks to being commercially savvy and always staying ahead of the game; oh and several multi-million dollar cash injections from wealthy investors has certainly helped matters.

There are over 40 million small business pages on Facebook. Many of these businesses don’t have websites, relying on Facebook as their only online representation, and the Shopify app has made it even easier for small businesses to sell their wares direct from Facebook.

Modern social media usage

In the last few years the way in which we use social media has changed, here are just a few ways how:

• More and more websites and blogs feature ‘like’, ‘share’, ‘+1’ and ‘tweet’ buttons that enable users to share interesting content with their followers at the click of a button.
• The combination of next gen mobile technology, 3G/4G, and free Wi-Fi offered in more places means that sharing photographs, status updates, videos etc is easier while we’re out and about.
• Shopping plug-ins allow users to interact with and purchase items straight from their favourite social media platform, so businesses are cashing in on our social addiction.

Do you remember the days when you’d go on holiday and have to wait until you were home to transfer your photos from your digital camera to your computer before you could share them with your Facebook friends? Mobile devices with high quality cameras built in, along with easily accessible Wi-Fi now mean you can add new photos whenever, and wherever you are in the world, all from one device!

The following infographic contains 15 fascinating facts and statistics about social media; for example, did you know that around 500 million tweets are sent every day? That’s 5787 tweets every second!