The Rise of Social Media

It is an accepted by the world of business that social media plays a vital role in digital marketing, allowing spirits brands to reach millions of consumers worldwide.The tremendous use of social media is demonstrated brilliantly in this data from Statista, which gives a projection for 2019 social media users to reach approximately 2.77 billion people. That’s right… 2.77 billion! That’s 36% of the estimated current worldwide population of 7.7 billion (shown in this equally brilliant Current World Population clock ). According to research from Betipy, the 2.77 billion social media users in 2019 have risen from the recorded 0.97 billion users in 2010, giving a whopping increase of 1.8 billion over this 9-year period. The scale of this is simply unimaginable, and it’s set to continue, with 2021 figures expected to increase by a further quarter of a billion users to reach 3.02 billion.

This isn’t a unique case, and this process of evolution has driven the social media landscape from a selection of early, cumbersome sites, all the way through to the wealth of brilliant platforms available today. We went from Piczo and Bebo to Facebook and Twitter in a matter of years. Many past social media successes have been destroyed by their upcoming new rivals, such as the overthrow of Myspace by Facebook. It’s interesting to read old articles that discuss this takeover as it was happening, such as this Forbes article from January 2011. The article explores how and why Facebook flourished while Myspace deteriorated, eventually leading to Myspace being forced to lay off half their workforce in the same week as the article. 

As the old giants fell, the new behemoths rose. According to another informative bar chart from Statista, the top five most popular social network platforms worldwide, in terms of their number of active users, are:

1. Facebook: 2,320 Million
2. YouTube: 1,900 Million
3. WhatsApp: 1,600 Million
4. Facebook Messenger: 1,300 Million
5. WeChat: 1,098 Million

Interestingly, some sites that may be widely considered larger, such as Twitter and Snapchat, fall further down the list, at #12 (330M) and #17 (287M), respectively.