It all began in 1958 when the United States Department of Defense was forced to develop new technologies for military use, as a consequence of the Cold War, creating ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), a computer network that would allow the different academic and state institutions to communicate; as a consequence, in 1971 it was possible to send the first email and 1990 begins what today we know as the internet.
All this triggered the population’s need to be able to communicate, interact and meet new people from anywhere in the world and thus SixDegrees was born, the first social network.It worked as an “electronic directory”, connecting the user with their acquaintances and, in turn, with the people they knew and so on, however, it was not successful due to its limited interaction and closed in 2001.
In 2002, new proposals such as LinkedIn and MySpace were born, which maintained the essence of connecting people but in a different way. LinkedIn headed for the business world, business and employment, achieving in 2008 more than 25 million registered users.On the contrary, MySpace succeeded in the music field allowing artists to promote their songs and reach a large audience, plus it had many more features such as interacting with other people around the world, sharing videos, images and blogs.In 2006 it was the most visited social network in the world, however, in 2008 users migrated to Facebook, positioning the web as the #1 social network in digital communication and the other MySpace users migrated to YouTube as a means of viewing videos and music.The death of MySpace only means one thing, digital media are constantly evolving and audience and content segmentation was more relevant.
In 2010 Instagram arrived with the proposal of being a social network where you share your photos, in 2011 Twitch, the platform for live broadcasts, especially for gamers and finally in 2016 TikTok arrived, a social network with the aim of publishing videos of 15 seconds to addictive entertainment.
And now in 2023, what is the aim of social networks? It has been evident that in recent years they have taken 180º turns, what were previously simple social networks with the objective of entertainment and connection with different people in the world, are now vital platforms for brand positioning and sales generation.Now people are their company and position themselves on social networks, either for their knowledge on a topic or for making recommendations.
