It all began in a college dorm two decades ago. What started as a networking platform for Ivy League colleges, soon garnered a life of its own. It began with a site that harvested student mugshots from the university’s intranet, which turned out to cause a stir, but nowhere was the controversy and life it created as big as its successor – TheFacebook, Facebook, or now Meta.
For 20 years now, Meta has become an integral part of our lives. It was nowhere a unique idea. There already were social networking sites that had intrigued people – MySpace, Friendster, and Orkut. But the platform rose to popularity starting with its exclusivity, and the control it gave people.
Today, 20 years later, the platform is still one of the world’s largest, and has over 3 billion people, – that is 60 per cent of all internet users globally – continuing to use the platform. According to a report by The Economist, , six of the 10 most downloaded mobile apps last year belonged to Meta, Facebook’s parent company, which is also the world’s largest seller of advertising after Google. Meta’s market value today has surpassed $1 trillion.
As per reports, last year Facebook had over 70 million active users in the MENA region. And had become a significant marketing tool for businesses looking to reach new customers and expand their online presence. In fact, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and Morocco, all rank above the worldwide average of 59.3 per cent of Facebook usage.
But how does the platform continue to stay relevant? In the initial days, it was the exclusivity, and emphasis of gaming social relationships through comments, likes, pokes, shares, and friend counts, and the Wall that updated the users on the lives of their friends and acquaintances.
However, the world has quickly transformed. Powered by artificial intelligence, several competitors like TikTok are giving Facebook a run for its money. But that did not deter the social media giant, by this time the company had already acquired WhatsApp, the instant messaging app, and Instagram. It had the technical and resource might to even recreate the features of stories of SnapChat, and later Reels from TikTok.
The company has also started investing heavily in AI, where it uses algorithms to come up with newer ways to engage with an audience that is ever changing and looking for newer means of connecting.
While the walls, likes, comments and shares aren’t as popular as they once were, social media is getting more popular than ever. Today, the average internet user, according to reports spends nearly 2.5 hours a day on social media platforms, according to GWI. The usage of these platforms has seen an uptick during the pandemic, which is still running strong, more people are going online and signing up.
On android devices, the total time spent using social media apps account for about 70% of the world’s phones and tablets. According to Data.AI this was a 42 per cent jump since 2020, and lasts over 2.3 trillion hours.
Since its early days Facebook, and now Meta has been in the eye of the storm. Yet, it continues to grow stronger with each passing year. Whether it is user data, the infamous Cambridge Analytica Scandal, the polarising effect of the platform, to now the more recent Senate hearing in the US, Facebook continues to grab eyeballs even after 20 years.
With its growing use of AI, and the more recent launch of Threads to take on Twitter, Facebook continues to reinvent itself, and gather a lot more marketing dollars than ever before.
