Created by Juliana Abril, Samantha DiFiore, Casee Harl, Donovan Jackson, Juan Manosalva Lopez, Marcus Morris, Shae Parr, Roger Taylor, Abby Turner

Emerging media.

Certainly by now, social media are not “emerging.” But they are evolving. Having started with Six Degrees in 1997, the average daily social media usage of internet users worldwide amounted to 151 minutes per day in 2022 according to Statista, up from 147 minutes in the previous year.

Six Degrees is widely considered to be the very first social networking site. Founded by Andrew Weinreich in May 1996, the site launched the following year and combined popular features such as profiles, friends lists and school affiliations in one service.Jul 6, 2011
First it’s Six Degrees. Then MySpace. Then Friendster. Then Facebook. Facebook has 3.049 billion monthly active users as of 2023 according to the Kepios blog DataReportal.

Overall, a total of 15 social media platforms have at least 400 million active users in January 2024. And there are 5.04 billion social media users around the world in January 2024, equating to 62.3% of the total global population.

Social media occupy a significant portion of the traffic on the internet. According to a Statista poll, as of the third quarter of 2023, the main reason for using the internet worldwide was finding information, with around six in 10 users naming it. Staying in touch with friends and family was the second-most popular reason for the users to go online, while watching videos, TV shows, or movies ranked third. Indeed, as Danny Shea reported in Huffington Post in 2008, social networking sites became the hottest attraction on the Internet, dethroning pornography.

GOAL

The goal of social media is to increase awareness awareness of a product or service. Even the producer of the social media as an individual can be a product or service. In general, social media posts serve to provide the reader, listener or viewer with information including sending them to a website for more information.Secondarily, the goal of any social media post is to get shared.

 
STRUCTURE
The best social media posts have five components:
  • salient information, information that is relevant to the reader, listener or viewer
  • a relevant visual that will pull the viewer into the post
  • a hashtag (#) that will help make the post easier to find
  • a mention (@) so some other person or group is aware of the post
  • a link providing the consumer with a place to go to get more information