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Top1. Introduction
Social networks are websites that are based on specific foundations and work to bring people together and enable them to express themselves, exchange their interests and ideas, and make new friends with people who share their interests.
There are many forms of social networking, including: blogs, forums, etc. These networks first appeared in 1971; The first messages were sent by e-mail between two computers placed next to each other. The first social networking site was established in 1994 under the name Geocities; It enabled users to create their own sites and design them to suit them, after that the first instant messaging tools were established under the name AOL in 1997, and it is a social networking site, as it enabled users to share their personal information. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are among the most popular social networks known today, and the goals of using these sites and other social networks are multiple; Some of these networks aim to connect people with each other and make friends around the world, and some of them aim to create social networks within a specific scope limited to a specific category and field.
Social networking sites have become a widespread global phenomenon and occupy a large part of the time of people of all kinds, and have contributed to pushing social relations as well as economic business from the actual reality to the virtual world, by facilitating the process of communication for users with each other to put forward and exchange ideas, opinions, visual and audio files and build Social and professional relationships.
1.1 Statistics and Economic Motivations
Social networking has become increasingly important, more than half a billion new users joining social media platforms over the past year, bringing the global total to 4.33 billion users by April 2021. This growing popularity has been exploited within e-commerce and is playing an increasing role in the purchasing process, either to inquire (62%), to make a purchase (49%) or to communicate with the customer of the service (42%) (Global Digital, 2021).
This statistic (Figure 1) provides data on the global advertising revenue of social networks in 2017 as well as a forecast thereof until 2021. The source (Statista, 2021) estimated that in 2021, the revenue would amount to 50.89 billion U.S. dollars, up from 21.49 billion in 2017.
Figure 1.
Social network advertising revenues in the United States from 2017 to 2021-in billion U.S. dollars Source: (Statista, 2021)
The following statistics come from early 2020 data about social media advertising:
Social ad impressions are up 20%, year over year.70%of marketers who use paid channels online use paid social. for examples Facebook ads reach 1.95 billion of the platform’s 2.5 billion monthly users.80% of social referrals to e-commerce sites came from Facebook in Q1 2019. Twitter shows ads to 152 million “monetizable users” every day. While 80% of Twitter’s users are international.92% of Instagram users say they’ve followed a brand, clicked on their website, or made a purchase after seeing a product/service on the platform.928.5 million people can be reached by ads on Instagram. Snapchat has 218 million daily active users as of Q4 2019. Snapchat’s advertising revenue was forecast at about 2 billion USD in 2020. Social ad spending increases 20% to $43 billion USD in 2020 (Paige, 2020).