2009’s Social Media Milestones
By Jenna Lebel
As 2009 comes to an end, we reflect on all of the huge milestones that have taken place in social media over the course
of the year. Obviously this is a mere snapshot and we realize there are many more accomplishments from this past year. What are some of your favorite social media moments of 2009? And what milestones do you expect to see in 2010?
- If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s third most populated, behind China and India.
- Facebook registered its 350-millionth member in December, a phenomenal growth spurt considering the firm had 140 million members one year earlier.
- Some Facebook platform apps continued to flourish phenomenally–namely, games. Companies like Zynga and Playdom manufactured one “social game” after another, pulling in revenue that collectively may have surpassed Facebook’s own (Hello, Farmville!).
- Some analysts estimate that there are more than 70 million Twitter users.
- Another measure of Twitter’s influence of world events came in June, when Twitter became a major conduit for the world’s news and communication from Iran as residents protested the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The U.S. State Department even asked Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance to make sure Iranians were able to tweet.
MySpace
- MySpace hired former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta to spearhead a turnaround for the News Corp.-owned social site as it saw its traffic increasingly eaten up by Facebook’s; at year’s end, it was still struggling to reinvent itself as a music and pop-culture powerhouse.
YouTube
- YouTube reached 100 million U.S. viewers in March as it lead the growth charge in online video viewing.
- In October, on the third anniversary of the acquisition by Google, YouTube announced that they were serving “well over a billion views a day” worldwide.
- Likely a direct result of a struggling economy, LinkedIn’s popularity grew in 2009. With more than 55 million users representing over 150 industries around the world, LinkedIn is the premiere destination for professional networking.
General
- More businesses continued adopt social media in 2009 and plan to get more involved in the new year.
- While the idea of running separate social networks on mobile phones was quashed long ago with the launch of Facebook’s slick mobile site and apps for handsets like the iPhone and BlackBerry, location-based networking apps like Foursquare, Brightkite, and Gowalla have started to break into the mainstream.
- Google and Bing incorporate live Twitter posts into search results (Twitter needed Google, and such a partnership was one of few revenue streams for Twitter this year.)
