Are you curious about the origins of social media marketing?
The idea behind social media as a whole predates Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. It all started in the early 1970s when technology started to advance quickly. Choose our Social Media Marketing Write For Us category if you wish to write a blog post about Social Media Marketing.
Platforms that we now know as social media started to emerge during the late 1990s. Social media marketing was bound to happen eventually.
However, what did the initial attempts at social media marketing look like? To what extent did they succeed? And how has it changed with time?
Now let's explore the background of social media marketing.
The History of Social Media Marketing
The concept of building networks between computers first surfaced in the 1940s, following the invention of computers. CompuServe and other early internet access providers were established in the late 1960s.
The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a rise in technological sophistication and a growing prevalence of computers in homes.
Six Degrees, the first official social media website, was founded in 1997 by Andrew Weinreich. Social networking was made possible by the platform's ability for users to friend other users and upload profiles.
Around the same time, a number of blogging websites, such as Open Diary, started to become well-known, giving rise to the modern internet phenomena that we are all familiar with.
The Inaugural Years of Social Media Marketing
Shortly after social media gained widespread use, social media marketing's early history got underway.
Social Media Marketing Is Made Possible by Facebook
A young Harvard student launched the website Facebook in 2004. Later on, it changed its name to Facebook, the massive company that it is today.
It was the second attempt at a social media platform by Mark Zuckerberg.
He founded Smashface the previous year, a website where students' images were uploaded against their will so that others could rate them according to how gorgeous they were.
After a few days, the website was taken down, and Harvard University made Zuckerberg issue a formal apology.
Facebook, though, was unique.
It quickly gained popularity among college students and garnered a $500,000 investment from PayPal founder Peter Thiel the same year it launched.
The social media platform opened its membership to people outside of colleges in 2006. That year, by October, there were fifty million users on it. Facebook Ads would debut a month later.
An Illustration of Pre-Social Media Marketing
A notable instance of social media marketing in the early stages was the "Share a Coke" campaign by Coca-Cola.
There was a Facebook advertisement for the 2012 campaign.
Facebook users were encouraged by the advertisement to design their own personalized Coke cans and to share virtual Coke cans with their friends.
The Coca-Cola Facebook page had a 39% rise in fans and the Facebook website witnessed an 870% increase in traffic as a result of the campaign.
In Australia, 378,000 personalized Coke cans were printed, and about 76,000 virtual cans were shared online.