Social media highlights of 2014

2014, the year of the selfie, has come to an end. The marketing team at Fisher Jones Greenwood takes a look back on some of the social media highlights from the year.

Social media witnessed some major events in 2014, one of which managed to crash Twitter and made its way into the Oxford dictionary. We are of course talking about the infamous selfie. The majority of us know what a selfie is, the act of taking a photo of one’s self from an outstretched hand. What started out as the ultimate expression of vanity has evolved into something depicting the locations or stars a person stumbles past.

By far the most famous selfie to hit social media is the “if only Bradley’s arm was longer” selfie, whereby several movie stars squeezed into shot at the 2014 Oscars. Shortly after the selfie had been uploaded to twitter, the system crashed. Twitter themselves emailed Ellen informing her of this…

Next up is the ALS ice bucket challenge, something which became an instant craze across Facebook. Who would have thought pouring ice cold water over your own head could be so popular? Well there have been over 28 million ice bucket challenge related interactions on Facebook. But this was not some random act of soaking oneself, the challenge raised over $100m in 30 days for the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Association. That’s over $3m raised per day!

2014 also said hello to Ello, the advert free approach to social media. Ello, set up by Paul Budnitz and Todd Berger, is a brand new social networking platform completely void of adverts. A feature they are now legally obliged to retain after becoming a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). Ello claim to have been receiving 45,000 join requests per hour, something which they had not prepared for. Perhaps Facebook has a revolution on its hands?

The question now is, what does 2015 have in store for us?