When Did Social Networking Begin?

Have you heard of social networking?  Social networking seems to be the hot topic lately but how long ago did it start? According to Google searches it really only started at the late part of the 2005 or early part of 2006. At least this is when people started searching for it.

I would argue social networking started much much earlier.

For centuries tribes, villages, towns, cities and the like networked with each other in order to survive and progress. No one man created everything he ever needed by himself. He networked to get there.

The term social networking most of the time is referring to “social media”. Social media, or at least the platforms to produce, is what people are looking for success in. There are numerous businesses and agencies looking to help your business but be cautious in hiring someone outside of your network.

The chart below shows all searches for “social networking” from 2004 until today. This is the relative total and doesn’t really mean much by itself unless you compare it to something else. So just remember that up until 2005 you did not have any friends because no one was searching for “social networking”. Well, this is just in the google world. Before this you just used phone, email and post it notes.

social networking 1

Now let’s compare “social networking” with the master of this term and the most famous platform, “Facebook“.  What you will notice is that searches for Facebook begin relatively at the same time as social networking but now dwarfs it by comparison. So relatively speaking Facebook is searched many, many more times. Try and think back to when you opened your Facebook account on this time line and place yourself amongst the population.  Were you earlier or later than your friends in your “social network”?  The same goes for Twitter. Twitter isn’t searched very often now that the platform is established. (LinkedIn never shows up on the chart relative to Facebook so I did not reference it).

social networking search