The first social networks. Development of social networks

This material can be used as instructions for use. If you need to promote your page on a social network, just open the text and proceed step by step!

I’ll tell you how to use an integrated approach to promoting your business, based on statistics, analysis and the use of effective tools for SMM promotion. I have developed 7 steps that will help you develop your page from scratch and make it interesting for your customers.

Step #1. Defining the concept of community

Your page should convey a certain concept. If this concept has already been formed within your business, this is a significant plus. The concept should represent the guiding concept, the set of views of the company's management on current customer problems, and how your business or product can solve these problems.

For example: There is no effective and fast pizza delivery service on the market. Our service helps restaurants deliver their goods to the consumer on time, and for the consumer it ensures fast and inexpensive delivery of pizza, preserving its taste, temperature and taste properties.

Remember that the concept determines the strategy of action and influences further methods of promotion on social networks.

Step #2. Setting goals

We set ourselves goals that will increase key business performance indicators. Goals must be set and based on the SMART system, that is, they must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and controllable.

In our case, we write the following goals:

• Identify our competitors and analyze their activity on social networks.
• Identify and analyze our target audience.
• Optimize our page for the audience.
• Develop a content plan for all segments of our target audience.
• Identify the most effective and profitable tools for page development.
• Test the tools and analyze their effectiveness.
• Start leading a group.

Step #3. Data collection and analytics

This can be done by an individual specialist, an agency, or you yourself. This period includes the following activities:

• Identify all possible competitors and analyze what they are doing to attract users and how effectively. Based on monitoring key queries (wordstat), the number of users and measuring user activity, the leading market players can be identified.
• Identification of competitor groups based on SMM tools and audience core statistics (active core, moderately active core, inactive core). What is the core audience? It often happens that in a group or page, 10-15% of users from the total number of subscribers regularly engage in user activity: liking posts, leaving comments, reposting on their pages, or actively leading discussions. If you look at the most active users, you can identify certain patterns in their behavior and preferences.
• Conduct and collect user requirements for each core and develop custom scripts.

For example: Masha Ivanova, 23 years old, works in sales in Moscow, is single, loves smart solutions and life hacks for the home, loves beautiful interior design, cats on Instagram and short useful texts.

Of course, these scenarios will be conditional, but they will help us develop content in the future that will take into account maximum user preferences.

• Identification of effective times for posting content (daily, weekly, monthly, holidays), using analysis of user activity in similar communities. For example, on Saturday morning you can publish material at 12:00, since only at this time your subscribers wake up.

Step #4. Page optimization

Optimization based on user page scenarios for all audience cores (Wiki markup, design, description, short URL, album titles, discussion titles, etc.). Here you need to really invest in a beautiful and pleasant design, and if you have completed the previous steps, it will be much easier for you to explain to the designer what audience he is working for.

Step #5. Content plan development

The most interesting and difficult part of the work is developing a content plan for each core audience. You identify the topic and format of the post.

Example: Monday at 18:31 the history of the creation of the gadget should be published.

Now you must find sources of content. These could be RSS feeds, public pages, blogs, news publications, opinion leaders, copywriters, videographers, photographers, artists.

Describe the content requirements based on the text and title of posts. Indicate what media materials should be present in the group’s posts and albums. What topics should be raised by group members? Ideally, you receive a completed grid of post formats in a content plan, for example, for a month to post. Based on these requirements, you can create requirements for outsourced performers: photographers, designers, etc.

Step #6. Testing and identifying effective tools

At this stage, you begin publishing your content on the page. To determine the effectiveness of the tools, you must not forget about collecting statistics. For example, track the number of transitions, count coverage, attract new users per day, week or other specific period of time.

Here you should focus on the ROI (return of investment) indicator - the ratio of the amount of profit or loss to the amount of investment. This indicator is expressed as a % and will show you the most effective and ineffective channels for attracting an audience on the Internet (ad exchanges, banners, affiliate programs, paid publications and posts) for your page. From all these attraction channels, you remove ineffective, time-consuming and expensive ones.

Step #7. Resource development

You have done the almost impossible! You have collected content and a systematic approach to publishing it on social networks. You know your audience almost by sight and know what they like. Considering that quite a lot of money has been spent on analysis, a reasonable question arises: what more can be done? Using the data from these studies, you can not only improve your website, but also expand your business by offering a new product or service.

At the initial stage of community development and business promotion on social networks, fill the group with content for about 20-30 posts. A user who comes by invitation or contextual advertising will want to scroll through the community feed, and if you have 1-2 news, then most likely he will not subscribe to it.

On VKontakte it is better to first create a group (on Facebook it is better to create a page). VKontakte allows you to convert a group into a page and vice versa. The group will give you the opportunity to invite users for initial content. Invite only those users who may be interested in the group's materials or your business. Don’t expect high conversions at the initial stage; do a comprehensive advertising campaign using an advertising exchange or direct placement through administrators of similar communities. Pay special attention to the advertising post, place a “shooting” picture in the context of the community in which you are advertising. Here's an example -

The term " social network" was introduced in 1954 by Manchester School sociologist James Barnes in his work “Classes and Assemblies in a Norwegian Island Parish,” which was included in the collection Human Relations. He developed and expanded an approach invented in the 1930s to study the relationships between people using sociograms, that is, visual diagrams in which individuals are represented as dots and the connections between them as lines. However, the idea of ​​a social network as a structure, the elements of which are actors (individuals or organizations), was anticipated by scientists back in the late eighties - the French sociologist David Emile Durkheim and his German colleague Ferdinand Tönnies practically described the nature of this phenomenon in their theories and studies of social groups.

The understanding of a social network has certainly changed since that time; the development of technologies through which online networks emerged played a significant role in this. In this work, by social network we will understand a platform (online service or website) for building social networks or social relationships between people who, for example, have common interests, experience, real-life connections or belong to the same field of activity. A social network consists of each user’s personal channels (usually called profiles), their social connections, as well as a number of additional services.

The first social network in the modern sense of the term is considered to be the site “Odnoklassniki” (Classmates), which appeared in 1995. Created by Randy Conrad, an engineer at Boeing, who really wanted to find his classmate. Like its modern Russian counterpart, the site helped registered users find and maintain contact with friends and acquaintances, with those with whom a person dealt throughout his life - in kindergarten, school, university, at work or while in military service. It still exists today. However, the American service for classmates for a long time did not support the creation of personal pages (profiles) and adding friends, it was limited to the ability to connect a person with his educational institution and search through the list of people who studied there, so there is a different opinion on the topic of which social network should be considered first, and it has a right to exist.

Researchers highlight among others the dating site SixDegrees.com, created in 1997. However, unlike Odnoklassniki, this resource existed only until 2000. What makes this site special is a number of tools that allow users to create personal pages, add friends, and, since 1998, search through friends’ pages. Although at that time many well-known dating sites and sites that united representatives of the same community offered similar services separately: personal pages could be created on almost all services, and ICQ and AIM messengers supported lists of friends - only the social network SixDegrees.com combined all these possibilities .

Naturally, sites with such goals and functions did not appear on the Internet out of nowhere. The creation of services on the World Wide Web that are so similar to modern ones is preceded by the history of the transition of social networks from offline to online and their subsequent development on a new platform.

In the offline era, people actively used another network for communication – the telephone network. It was in her and thanks to her that social networks were born. Therefore, the “Era of Telephone Hackers” (1950s – early 1990s) can be considered as the first stage of their formation. In the author’s opinion, it makes sense to talk about this point in more detail than the others, since this stage of development of the social network is the most distant and different from its current state. The first thing to consider is the motives of the hackers: their goal was not to profit from fraud, but rather they were a kind of “technophile” and “phoneaholic” - tech-savvy people who were addicted to communicating on the phone.

These telephone network “researchers” created homemade electronic devices with which they made free calls and gained access to the then-existing experimental telephone system database. They accessed test lines, which they used to conduct telephone seminars and conferences.

In hacked corporate voicemail systems, there existed what we might now call the first “audio blogs” or “podcasts.” In order to listen to them, it was necessary to enter the correct extension number after dialing 1-800. As in modern blogs, you could leave comments on “audio posts” of that time, although only in the form of voice messages. The creators of telephone "audio blogs" typically responded to their listeners in subsequent episodes.

Like many members of thematic communities of social networks, telephone hackers were not limited to telephone communication, they organized meetings in reality (today even a special term -tweetup) has appeared to refer to meetings of Twitter users “in real life”.

Offline networks moved online as personal computers and modems spread. The first stage of the transition is logical to associate with the period of widespread use of electronic bulletin boards (English Bulletin Board Systems (BBC)) (1979-1995). These are sites where you could post your ad and read the ads of other users. They had message sections where discussions took place, it was possible to download files and even play online games - in a word, they really had a lot in common with modern social networks. The first such site appeared in the public domain in 1979.

During the same period, the international amateur computer network “FidoNet” appeared, which is also sometimes called the first social network (by the way, in the Russian version the network itself positions itself this way). It was created by American programmer Tom Jennings in 1984 and served to transfer messages from electronic bulletin boards to each other. He originally made it to transfer messages from his electronic board to his friend's electronic board, and the structure of the network was linear: each node communicated directly with the other. As the number of nodes grew, the structure had to be changed to a tree structure. However, its functionality remained quite specific and limited: for example, it was possible to exchange mail with another network node only at a specially designated hour at night, when the cost of phone calls was lower.

The next step of the social network from its origins to its present state was the emergence and spread of commercial online services on the Internet (1979-2001), which brought interactive and social Internet to the masses. In the USA, the AOL service played a particularly large role in this, first growing into a large portal with various forums, mail, online games, and then into a media corporation. In general, online services served as a moderated platform for communication - in some cases even in real time (CompuServe.com offered its users an online chat system in 1980).

After the advent of the World Wide Web in 1991, the Usenet system, a computer network used for communication and publishing files, was initially popular. It appeared in 1980, i.e. before the advent of the World Wide Web, however, in September 1993, the Internet provider AOL provided its users with access to it, and it became part of the Internet and the first Internet platform for discussions. However, soon both she and the electronic bulletin boards could not withstand the competition with the forums that were gaining popularity. In parallel with them (year of creation - 1988), IRC (Internet Relay Chat) developed - a protocol that made it possible to communicate online in real time - and then (after launch in 1996) ICQ (from English I seek you - “I looking for you") and other messaging services. And at the same time, the first social networks of an almost modern format began to appear.

From that moment until today, many social networks have been created, some of them marked the stages of change in the social network as a phenomenon.

For example, LiveJournal, launched in 1999, in addition to becoming the first social network on the Runet, introduced a certain dynamic component as mandatory in the list of components of a classic social network. Being a blogging platform, it was not based on static profiles, but on regularly updated profiles. However, not all researchers classify blogging and microblogging platforms as social networks; some classify them as a separate category. The platform is still popular, although to a lesser extent than before.

As the number of social networks increased in the web space, thematic social networks gradually began to appear, for example, LinkedIn became one of the first and currently the most popular network of business contacts: 225 million registered members. In March 2013, the site became the 22nd most visited site in the world. It is impossible not to mention the social network MySpace, which, continuing and developing the tradition of LiveJournal, marked the transition to an era of providing users with greater opportunities for creativity than before. For a long time, MySpace remained the most popular social network in the United States and around the world; in July 2006, the site became the most visited resource in the United States, overtaking the Yahoo! postal service. (Yahoo!), but for the last few years in a row, traffic to the resource has been steadily declining.

The term “social network” itself appeared long before the Internet - in 1954, the concept of social networks was introduced by the American sociologist James Barnes, meaning by it the extensive relationships of an individual with other people. The concept of a network as a system of human relationships quickly gained popularity, and in the second half of the twentieth century it was actively used for dating. Maintaining and creating various social connections on the Internet began with the birth of the Network itself - e-mail, teleconferences, opportunities for interactive communication, various chats. Initially, the purpose of all these communication tools was not so much communication as solving business issues and work problems. We can say that social networks on the Internet arose already in the 80s of the twentieth century. Despite the fact that the first social networks were somewhat far from today's understanding, the main principles were the same. The first network that united users from most of the world was FidoNet, which made it possible to transfer text messages and other files from a single storage location to various sites, regardless of their location.

The first social network, more or less similar to today's networks, arose in the United States in 1995 - it was the Classmates.com project, in which the search for participants was carried out by school. But social networks reached their maximum scope after the opening of the Friendster network. In 2002, Jonathan Abrams decided to create a completely new dating site. If previously all relevant services could only connect two strangers with each other, Friendster provided assistance in finding friends based on various criteria and showed connections between people. After just three months of operation, Friendster had over 3 million registered users. By 2012, there were already 115 million people from all over the world on Friendster, despite many other social networks. Almost immediately after Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn and, finally, Facebook were launched, which began the mass craze for social networks. Created in 2004 exclusively for Harvard students, Facebook became the world's most popular social network in 2008.

In the Russian-language segment of the Internet, social networks began to gain popularity in 2006, when Odnoklassniki.rui VKontakte appeared. After Facebook and Twitter acquired Russian-language interfaces, the passion for social networks in RuNet became widespread (5).

1.3. History of the creation of the Facebook network

Initially, the social network was called Thefacebook. Mark began writing code for his new website in January 2004, registering the domain thefacebook.com on the 11th. Thefacebook itself was launched on February 4, 2004. Back then it was a social network exclusively for Harvard students. In the first 24 hours of the site's existence, more than a thousand people registered on thefacebook.com. And a month later, more than half of the university students already had their own page on the website. Of course, such a rapid growth of the site also required an increase in the number of people working on it. Mark took his friends to the team.

The first expansion of the network occurred in March 2004: Facebook became available at Stanford, Columbia and Yale universities. Further history developed rapidly. In the summer of 2004, Facebook was founded, and Sean Parker, an entrepreneur who had been giving advice to Mark for quite a long time, became its president. The company then moved to Palo Alto, California. The “the” from the site’s name disappeared in 2005 after the company acquired the Facebook.com domain for a large price of $200 thousand. In September of the same year, the opportunity to register became available to US high school students, although at that time they needed to receive an invitation from one of the already registered participants. September 26, 2006 was one of the most important milestones in the history of the project: the site opened registration for everyone who has a working e-mail address. The only age limit left is 13 years. Since then, both the site and the company have been actively developing. In October 2008, Facebook's international headquarters moved from Silicon Valley to Dublin, Ireland. Thanks to his talent, Mark Zuckerberg became the youngest billionaire in US history. He holds 35% of the company's shares. At 23, he was ranked 29th in Forbes magazine's ranking (6). Since the beginning of 2008, Facebook has been translated from English into 20 other languages. On June 20 of the same year, the Russian version of the site went live (7).

In 2012, Facebook crossed the billion active users mark for the first time. Every day, the social network processes at least 500 terabytes of information. Every day, site users upload a total of about 350 million photos and send each other more than 10 billion messages (8). The number of new registered accounts on Facebook is growing every day; on average, the social network is visited by about 757 million users per day. Every minute, 100 thousand people become friends on Facebook (9). On April 4, 2013, Facebook announced the creation of a mobile version of the site. According to forecasts, by the end of 2014, mobile device users will make up at least 80 percent of the entire social network audience. 728 million users visit the site daily from the mobile version (10).

Now Facebook is trying to take a serious position outside the United States. The developers do everything possible to make users feel comfortable and the site works stably, releasing various updates and innovations for the site. The company often faces such a problem as plagiarism. In some cases, Facebook management initiated legal proceedings against clone projects. The secret of the site’s success is that Facebook is an integral project that has become firmly entrenched in the lives of many people around the world (11).

1.4. History of the creation of the VKontakte network

Pavel Durov is known in the St. Petersburg segment of the Runet as the creator of the largest student forum and other student projects. One of his first projects was called Durov.com. This site was a repository of answers to exams in the humanities; the site was very popular during the session. Later, the founders of the network, Pavel and Nikolai Durov, initially developed the site as a resource aimed at young people, in particular, students, it was called Student.ru. But later, the site’s creators came to the idea that the target group of the project should include a wider audience, and they chose a neutral word for the new name - “contact”. The VKontakte brand fully reflected the purpose of the project - to give people the opportunity to always stay in touch with each other. Before the release of the large-scale social network Vkontakte, Pavel Durov advertised his project as a closed application to his own student forum, and it was possible to enter there only by invitation and indicating the real name and surname. On October 1, 2006, the domain vkontakte.ru was officially registered and on October 10 the project was launched. Initially, the site existed with the money of its creators, gradually attracting private investment. Literally from the very first year, VKontakte began its victorious march across the Runet. The user liked the site because on Vkontakte it was possible to easily and happily communicate with other network users, declaring oneself with open posts on the “wall” or privately through personal messages. Users could also create groups and hold group meetings, monitor the news and activities of their friends. In 2007, the number of registered users increased to 3 million people, surpassing Odnoklassniki in popularity. By February 1, 2007, Vkontakte had already become one of the most visited sites on the Runet, leaving behind large forums and dating sites. As of February 1, 2007, the site was visited by more than 25 thousand people per day, who viewed 2 million pages daily. By the end of this year, Durov’s social network took second place in popularity on the Runet and broke records for the volume of traffic generated. In 2009, the social network Vkontakte left Odnoklassniki far behind in terms of the number of visits, which exceeded 13 million in the month of January. In 2009, VKontakte was renamed to the new domain vk.com. Already 100 million happy owners of VKontakte profiles were registered in 2010 (12). The resource is visited daily by 4,000,000 people or more. The site's interface is available in more than 70 languages. On January 24, 2014, Pavel Durov sold the site to the CEO of Megafon. On September 16, 2014, Mail.ru Group bought the site from Megafon for $1.47 billion and are currently the owners. In terms of the number of users and traffic, the site is still ahead of Odnoklassniki, Moi Mir and the Russian-language segment of Facebook. From the statements of managers, we can conclude that the company will soon try to enter world markets. They plan to bypass Facebook by meeting the national needs of residents of a particular country (13).

When did social networks likeFacebook, VKontakte andTwitter, our world is divided into online and offline. With their help, we can communicate with each other, even being on different continents, listen to music, read books, look at photographs and much more. Social networks have greatly simplified our lives and tied us tightly to ourselves. Read more about their appearance and development in our article.

The emergence of social networks

A social network is a social structure consisting of a group of nodes, which are social objects (people or organizations), and connections between them (social relationships).

With the advent of the Internet (1969), James Barnes's scientific concept began to gain popularity. This led to the development of social networks on the World Wide Web.

The first social networks on the Internet

The emergence of modern blogs, social networks and the Internet was foreseen by the Russian writer and philosopher Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky back in 1835. At that time, he finished writing his utopian novel “The Year 4338.” The world described by the author is in some way reminiscent of the 21st century: “...magnetic telegraphs are installed between familiar houses, through which those living at a far distance talk to each other.” Odoevsky also talks about “household newspapers” published “in many houses, especially among those who have great acquaintances; they replace ordinary correspondence... The duty of publishing such a magazine once a week or daily is assigned to the dining butler in each house. This is done very simply: each time, having received an order from the owners, he writes down everything that was said to him, then takes the required number of copies using a camera obscura and sends them out to his friends. This newspaper usually contains notices about the health or illness of the owners and other home news.”

It is worth noting that Vladimir Fedorovich is not far from reality. However, of course, he could not have known about social networks, blogs and the Internet then.

17 years later, in 1988, Finnish scientist Jarko Oikarinen invented the IRC protocol - Internet relay chat - and software to implement it. It is now possible to communicate with each other in real time.

Then the American Randy Conrads created Classmates.com - the first social network in the modern sense. In it, registered users have access to a directory of graduates from various educational institutions. Thus, anyone can find classmates or fellow students. It is worth noting that Classmates.com immediately turned out to be in great demand. By the way, its popularity does not decline even today - more than 50 million people use the social network. Interestingly, Odnoklassniki is the Russian equivalent of Classmates.com. Currently, they have more than 290 million registered users.

History of the most popular social networks

In this part of the article, we will tell you, dear readers, about the history of the most popular social networks in Russia and the world - Facebook, VKontakte, Twitter and Instagram.

Facebook Inc. was founded on February 4, 2004 by four students who studied at Harvard University: Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. At the same time, a website of the same name appeared. It was initially only available to Harvard students. A little later, registration was opened to Boston universities, and then to all Americans with an email address in the .edu domain. Starting in September 2006, Facebook became available to all Internet users aged 16 years and older. Today it is one of the top five most visited websites in the world. It is not surprising that the network’s monthly audience is 1.968 billion people.

On October 10, 2006, an analogue of Facebook appeared in Russia - the social network “VKontakte”. Its creator is Pavel Durov. The site is available in many languages, but its main audience is Russian-speaking users.

It is worth noting that initially the resource was intended for students and graduates of Russian universities; after a while, it began to position itself as “a modern, fast and aesthetic way of communicating online.” According to SimilarWeb data for December 2017, VKontakte ranks 11th in the ranking of the most popular sites in the world. By the way, more than 410 million users are registered on this social network today.

“They were uploading and sharing photos like crazy,” notes Systrom. In this regard, he and his colleague decide to get rid of all functions, leaving only photo posting.

The move worked, and Burbn, or rather Instagram, gained unprecedented popularity.

Today, the app is ranked 17th on SimilarWeb's list and has more than 200 million active subscribers who have uploaded more than 16 billion different photos and videos.

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