The top 10 social media events of 2014

LinkedIn went to China, Facebook took over your phone and Snapchat took a huge image hit

With Facebook celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, it's an interesting time for social media. The space has grown up a lot in recent years, with a lot of companies already having gone public and having come up with effective, and reliable, business models.

But social media is still, in a lot of ways, trying to finding itself. There are many new companies popping up, and redefining what it can be, and how it can be used. Social media is an ever-changing space, and one that never seems to be resting on its laurels. It's one where the established players still have to worry about young upstarts stealing their thunder.

Here are the biggest events to happen in social media over the past year:

1. Facebook tried to take over your phone, and largely succeeded

Mark Zuckerberg has been adament that there will never be an official Facebook phone, but that does not mean it hasn't tried the idea in unofficial ways. 

It released a self-destruct messaging app, and Snapshot clone, Slingshot. It also debuted an anonymity app, echoing services like Whisper and Secret, called Rooms. In addition, it also bought fitness tracking app Moves and developed its own reader app, to give users top news, called Paper and launched Groups,  for users who want to share information with small groups of people. 

There's talk that the company could be releasing its own professional network, called Facebook At Work, that would provide workplace collaboration tools.And, of course, there was the decoupling of Messenger.

The strategy has not been an unqualified success: Slingshot is actually Facebook's second attempt to capitalize on Snapchat's success, with its previous app, called Poke, falling flat. Forcing people to download Messenger, though, has been a big success; the app has grown to 500 million users, up from 200 million in April. 

It certainly seems to be working better than Facebook's previously plan. In 2013, the company tried launching a new user interface for Android called Facebook Home. After that plan turned out to be a dud, Facebook took a new route in 2014: take over each aspect of your phone stealthily by releasing a suite of stand-alone apps. And it's a plan that seems to have been pretty effective so far.

2. Twitter stumbled over slowing user growth

2014 was a rough year for Twitter, as the newly public company saw its user growth plateau, causing it to miss estimates in multiple quarters, and putting into doubt the company's long-term viability. 

Twitter is expected to see its user numbers grow by 24.4%, down from 30.4% last year, according to data from eMarketer. And it only gets worse from there: while the company is expected to have roughly 400 million users by 2018, by that point the company's growth will have slowed to a mere 10.7%.

As a result, the company's stock has taken a beating as well. The company started out the year trading at $65 a share. As of Tuesday, it's stock is down to $35.85. At no point since February has it traded above $50 a share, and has not been able to rise about $40 in the last month. 

Of course, Twitter has been working extra hard to change the situation. CEO Dick Costolo has tried to paint it as something temporary, and has pledged to make the reversal of the trend one of the company's top priorities.

It overhauled its sign-in process, to make it easier to attract new users, and has also looked into monetizing unique visitors, a.ka. the ones who come to Twitter every month but don't sign in, giving the company a larger group to appeal to advertisers.

3. Monetizing beyond advertising

Everybody knows that advertising is the top moneymaker for the top social networks, but in 2014 there was a concerted effort by the new players, and the old, to expand into new categories.

The most telling example of that was Ello, which made it its mission to remain a clean social network. That means no selling of personal data, and no advertisements. And that is not just lip service: it made it so that it legally cannot run ads. Instead, the network has chosen another route: merchandising. 

The big draw for many networks, though, was payments. Snapchat teamed up with Square, allowing users to send money to each other through its text feature. Also, both Facebook and Twitter both launched buy buttons to allow users to buy goods from third parties without having to leave the app.

Even as networks looked for new ways to make money...

4. Advertising still remained a huge draw - Ads, Ads and more ads

Sure, social networks looked to new areas for revenue, but advertising remains too big a draw for any network, other than Ello apparently, to ignore it.

So Snapchat launched its first ads in October, putting them in the Recent Updates section and allowing users to not have to look at them if they don't want to. Either way, they disappear after 24 hours.

Pinterest, which debuted its first ad product, Promoted Pins, in 2013, ramped them up this year, introduced its first partners in May, and, on the strength of those limited tests, recently announced it would be opening them up to all advertisers at the beginning of 2015.

Facebook actually took the most interesting leap forward in 2014, finally launching its much talked about auto-play video ads that run in user NewsFeeds, then buying online video distribution and ad-platform LiveRail in July to give them a major boost. As of September, the network saw seeing one billion video views a month. 

5. Snapchat scandals

Snapchat came into 2014 riding high. It had become so popular that a Pew study from October 2013 found that 9% of all phones now have the Snapchat app installed on them. It also announced that its users were sending 350 million snaps every single day, up from 200 million in June.

But in 2014, it found out that being a top social media network isn't all fun and games.

There was the public battle between CEO Evan Spiegel, CTO Robert Murphy and their former frat brother Reggie Brown, who sued the company claiming that he had actually come up with the idea for Snapchat. It was finally settled in September, but no terms were disclosed. 

There were also a bunch of hacking incidents it had to deal with.

First, the company experienced a huge breach on New Year's Eve, which resulted in a total of 4.6 million user names and passwords being leaked, something which the company did not immediately apologize for. In mid-January, Snapchat users were hit with a wave of spam then again in February. 

More damaging, though, was a hacking that occured in October, which resulted in the release of a bunch of naked pictures of a lot of non-famous people. Snapchat was not responsible for the leaking of its images (a third party site took the blame for the incident) but all of these incidents no doubt made some people think twice about trusting Snapchat.

The worst incident of all for Snapchat were the leaked e-mails from Spiegel from his time in college, in which he referred to women as "bitches" and "sluts." A sample e-mail read, "LUAU FUCKING RAGED. Thanks to all of you. Hope at least six girl [sic] sucked your dicks last night. Cuz that didn’t happen for me.” Signed affectionately, “fuckbitchesgetleid. Spiegel.”

Snapchat's image took such a big hit in 2014, in fact, that the company resorted to hiring a powerful new PR chief in Jill Hazelbak, who had worked as a political consultant for a number of Republican candidates, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. She also worked as National Communications Director for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. 

Here's hoping that 2015 becomes the year that Snapchat finally grows up.

6. Facebook blew the messenger space wide open with its purchase of WhatsApp

One of the biggest acquisitions of the year was Facebook's $22 billion purchase of WhatsApp. Beyond that incredibly, high-price tag, the acquisition was important because it lit the mobile messaging space on fire.

After the deal was announced, mobile messaging became the hot space of 2014, and it led to a slew of other purchases and investments, which included Alibaba's $215 million investment in Tango, Rakuten's $900 million purchase of Viber and the purchase of Bubbly the social messaging service where people share text and voice updates, by Indian social networking company Altruist.

Mobile messaging had been bubbling under the surface for a while, especially in Asia, but Facebook proved its relevancy again by being out front, rather than trying to catch up to others, as it has seemed to for the last few years.

7. Slack took off like a rocket!

Every year there is a new social media network that, pretty much out of nowhere, takes off and becomes part of the lexicon. In 2012 that was Pinterest; in 2013 it was Snapchat.

The one that I did not see coming in 2014 was Slack, a workplace collaboration company in the vein of Yammer.  A spinoff of Tiny Speck, a company that was started by Stewart Butterfield, who previously started Flickr, Slack launched in August 2013, and went live in February of this year. 

The company seeks to bring team communication onto a single platform. It integrates with services that include Twitter, Dropbox, Trello, Asana, Google Docs, JIRA, MailChimp, Stripe, Zendesk and others to help consolidate team data. 

Slack raised two big rounds of funding in 2014: first a $42.75 million round in March, then a whopping $120 million round at the end of October, giving the company a $1.12 billion valuation. All that for a company that is used by 30,000 active teams, who send over 200 million messages every month.

The seemingly meteoric rise of Slack has not been without its difficulties, though, as the company suffered a leak after it was discovered that users could find out group names in rooms for companies they didn’t have access to by simply entering a dummy e-mail account. The issue was blamed on Slack's "team discovery" feature, a setting that allows users to introduce themselves to various teams within a company. 

Still, it doesn't get much better than a company, less than a year into its launch, already being worth over $1 billion. I have a feeling we'll be hearing a lot more about Slack in 2015.

8. Whisper aimed to become the new Twitter

At first glance, Twitter and Whisper don't seem to have much in common. Twitter is all about bringing people together, exchanging real-time information and fostering change. Whisper is about giving people a platform to share their innermost thoughts, but would seem to be limited in the immediate impact it could have on world events.

An incident in September, though, showed how Whisper could have a Twitter-like impact, when a man involved in a police standoff began using the service to document the incident, posting updates on pictures taken at the scene.

When I asked Neetzan Zimmerman, Whisper's editor in chief, at the time if  a service like Whisper, which allows someone to document  what is happening without fear of reprisal, will become the next Twitter, which turned out to be an extremely effective tool for affecting social change, he agreed with that assessment.

"Twitter really wasn’t really a player in the social field until individuals starting using it in different ways to live Tweet what was going on in their lives that people found newsworthy. That means different things that could be positive or negative, but surfacing that info, making it available, is what Whisper has been about," he told me. "People living their lives, doing something extreme or intense, or just struggling to get out of bed. Ultimately the platform serve the purpose to allow them to express themselves and things that are important to them."

The incident just goes to show you, social media still has the ability to surprise us in the different ways people  can choose to use it. 

9. Turkey went crackdown crazy

It's nothing new for countries around the world to crack down on social networks. There's nothing worse for unpopular governments than platforms specifically designed for people to get together.

This year, it was Turkey that decided its best move was to try to ban social media. It turned out as well as you'd expect.

In March, the country banned Twitter after Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan was accused of corruption on the service. The ban also happened to take place around a week before local elections were to take place in the country on March 30.

Of course, neither of those is not the official reason the government is giving for the move. Instead, they accused Twitter of refusing to remove certain links from its site, which have been deemed illegal by the country's courts. After two weeks, courts ordered the government to turn the service back on.

In addition to Twitter, the Turkish government also banned YouTube. The service was shut down on March 27th after a video appeared on the site with audio from a conversation between Turkey’s foreign minister, spy chief, and a top general in a high-security meeting that centered on the military situation in Syria. A court deemed that ban unconstitutional, saying that it was too broad. The decision still allowed the government to ban 15 individual videos.

Like I said, it's not new for this to happen, but it just shows how much of an impact social media can have, and how much people still need to fight for it in parts of the world.

10. LinkedIn went to China

For the older companies in the social media space, which are always looking for the next big growth opportunities, China is the Holy Grail. With its its 618 million Internet users, 500 million of which are on mobile, both Twitter and Facebook tried to make inroads there in 2014.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo went on a tour of Shanghai in March, making his first ever trip to the country, and while he was he reportedly met with Shanghai government officials, including representatives of the Shanghai Pilot Free Trade Zone. Twitter has been banned in China since 2009, but the meetings were seen as the possible first step toward normalized relations.

Facebook also took steps, with the company reportedly looking to open a new sales office in China. There are reportedly discussions going on that would allow Facebook to lease space in Beijing’s Fortune Financial Center, which is located in the city’s central business district. Facebook has been banned in China since 2008.

Only one company, though, was actually able to make a deal happen: LinkedIn, which was able to launch its service in the country in February. However, the deal it made to gain entry also serves as a potential warning to others who wish to try.

After LinkedIn made its China announcement, the company also came under fire after it admitted that it was only able to operate there because it complied with Chinese censorship laws. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner defended the decision in a blog post written shortly after.

"As a condition for operating in the country, the government of China imposes censorship requirements on Internet platforms. LinkedIn strongly supports freedom of expression and fundamentally disagrees with government censorship," Weiner said. 

"At the same time, we also believe that LinkedIn’s absence in China would deny Chinese professionals a means to connect with others on our global platform, thereby limiting the ability of individual Chinese citizens to pursue and realize the economic opportunities, dreams and rights most important to them."

(Image source: business2community.com)