Facebook is 10 Years Old Today

Facebook turns 10 today, the 4th February, so happy 10th birthday Facebook! Facebook has grown immensely as a social network, a media sharing site and as a site that promotes traffic to and from other businesses. Since the dawn of the internet age social media has grown massively in popularity, from one form to another, and nowadays there are countless ways to share every aspect of your life with people from across the world. Facebook is certainly one of the leading facilitators of modern life when it comes to social media, but will it stay that way?

 

The past few years have seen a huge leap in terms of using social media as a way to connect with people, for both personal users and businesses, and the number of social media platforms is astounding. There are simpler ‘status’ platforms such as Twitter and Tumblr, whereas bloggers who want to collate their longer written works tend to collaborate over WordPress and Blogger. For the artists there is Instagram, Pinterest and Flickr and for the production and video artists we have Vimeo, Vine and the hugely successful YouTube.

All of these social media sites have the idea of bringing likeminded people together, and the concept of being able to link your profile on different platforms serves to further connect people over the internet. And now with mobile social applications, you can stay connected to these people even when not at home or at a computer.

So far Facebook has done a very good job of collating all these social media platforms together, and it works as a general ‘middle man’ of social media, because by joining Facebook, you can begin to connect with people, who suggest websites, Youtube videos, interesting artwork, and then links are directed to accounts on other platforms. Linking possibilities become endless, and due to the constant changing nature of the internet, a post which may have become lost in the ‘news feed’ can appear months later, and garner a whole new audience just through activity on social media.

In order to move forward into the future, Facebook’s founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg plans to reduce the necessity of Facebook credentials, as the ‘Pressure of only doing real identity things..is somewhat of a burden’ and this is certainly true, particularly when you consider that the internet is frequently used as a means of ‘escaping’ the world in which you identify your normal self. The idea of having an alternate profile online, allows users that anonymity, and could perhaps make breaches of personal privacy a thing of the past.

One of the dangers of Facebook has always been that users share too much. An inappropriate photo could soon become viral, gaining the user a lot of unwanted attention which often begins to affect the user’s offline profile and daily life. Jobs have been lost over throwaway remarks on Facebook.

One thing is certain however, although the popularity of Facebook seems to have slowed down in conjunction with the rise of several other different social media platforms – all of which offer the user a slightly different media sharing experience – it seems far from a dying platform!

For expert advice in managing your business’ social media campaigns, whether via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or anywhere else, why not get in touch to see how Artemis can help. We offer full training in the effective use of social media platforms and can even manage all your activity for you to ensure your business stays on top.