The evolution of social media: an introduction

Celebrating 15 Years of Infegy - Consumer Intelligence

I might date myself with this reference but here goes:
I have a quirky memory of walking to the cafeteria one morning my senior year in college, wondering who had posted hundreds of black-and-white fliers printed with a single slogan all over campus. They were prolific: posted every 2-3 feet, haphazardly taped to any surface that accepted the adhesiveness of scotch tape.

The slogan read, “Find Your Friends on Facebook.”

Fast-forward 15 years to when The Social Dilemma debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in September 2020. The revelatory docu-drama exposes how, through design and engineering, Big Social platforms like Facebook went from exclusive, social networks that connected students across college campuses to massive empires that had access and authority over the personal information and data of billions of people across the globe.

How did we go from text-based social-networking sites – some so emergent that they needed a flier-campaign to intrigue college students – to vast, global, online communities that fuel e-commerce, activism, hilarious video-challenges, new career-fields … as well as massive privacy breaches, political polarization, and social strife? This question points us to a relatively short, but extremely rich history of social media. It also forms the heart of the blog series we launch this week, in which we unpack the networking, structural, financial and cultural underpinnings of the way social media has evolved over the past 15 years. 

This year, Infegy - Consumer Intelligence celebrates 15 years as a leader in social media analytics. In other words, social media and the data, analysis and the consumer intelligence surrounding it has been our home terrain since 2007. The years in between have taught us that a deep understanding of the social media landscape will amplify your efforts to meet and, thereby, serve your audiences and customers. This is why through the rest of the 2022 year – in celebration of our 15 years of game-changing consumer intelligence solutions – we’re curating a retrospective of social media here on our blog.

This is more than an exercise in nostalgia.

Coming up in our next post, we explore the advances in technology and networking structures that led to increasingly immersive experiences on social media. How did we go from a text-based web to video, and what does social media analytics reveal about the future of augmented and virtual realities? If you are interested in a deep dive into this topic, you can also download our free, newly released technical report, “The Evolution of Social Media Part I: From Textual Communication to Immersive Experiences.”

Subscribe to our blog to catch upcoming posts in the Evolution of Social Media series where we will unpack mini-histories around:

• Oscillating trends around user privacy and ‘real name policy.’
• Finance and currency elements that shaped social media. 
• Social media features that birthed cultural movements.
• Strategies of commodifying social media content.
• Social media trends that are now iconic.
• Social media activism and the strategies that worked

For a tailor-crafted insight on how social media intelligence can inform your data-driven business, request a customized demo with our team.