Historical Evolution of Social Media: An Overview

Abstract

Social media has become the buzz word of marketing nowadays. Today it is difficult to visualise the effectiveness of promotion mix of any company without social media. Starting from basic means of exchanging information, it grew to development of means of communication whose purpose was manifold. With the advent of social media customers and businesses have become well connected with each other. Business to business, business to customer, and customer to customer communication has been great facilitated by social media. Various types of social media platforms have evolved over a period of time, which have become more sophisticated in terms of technology, more effective in terms of capability to influence the customers and more efficient in terms of reaching the customers in optimum time. All these developments took place over many years and have passed through several stages. The aim of this paper is to capture the historical developments of social media over a period of time.

Keywords: Social Media, Bulletin Board Systems, UseNet