Social media managers are in big demand right now. No wonder, as an increasingly larger share of communication between companies and their customers is taking place within the digital halls of social media. News on the latest products and services are increasingly being spread in the form of social media posts, either from the company’s official social media account, or even the personal accounts of individual company employees. Conversely, social media is also an increasingly popular arena for disgruntled consumers to voice their grievances over bad products, or sub-par customer service.

It’s easy to forget nowadays, but today’s world of salaried social media managers and worldwide social media marketing campaigns by big companies would have been seen as a bizarre concept in the heyday of the internet.

Back then, the internet was wilder, and blatantly uncommercial. While there were certainly companies profiting off services offered online, a huge portion of online content were amateur fan sites, discussion forums on niche interests, and just plain random stuff created by strangers for fun.

This was the environment where Mark Zuckerberg first created Facebook (initially known as “The Facebook”). The initial intentions for this website was for Harvard students to be able to easily connect to each other. It wasn’t meant to be particularly commercial or mainstream. It was originally intended to be a fun way to keep up with your classmates. In fact, a major feature of the original version of Facebook was that it showed users the different faces of their Harvard schoolmates, and allowed them to rate their attractiveness. It became insanely popular, gaining 22,000 views within 4 hours.

While certainly in poor taste today (indeed, it was quickly shut by Harvard leadership), the site was relaunched in 2004 under the name “thefacebook.com”. It became a hit not only in Harvard, but in other US campuses as well, before eventually spreading all around the world.

Of course, as with anything that gets wildly popular among the general population, big businesses and the state were quick to take notice. Pretty soon, every single business enterprise and world government worth their salt had a social media account somewhere. In this increasingly digitized and connected world, not having an online presence meant you might as well not exist, in the eyes of the public.

Another reason for businesses to set up social media accounts and post on them, is to bring themselves closer to their customers. Companies having their own social media accounts and using them to post amusing things and interesting news puts them on the same level as ordinary people, who use social media for much the same things. This allows corporations to seem much more like people you could talk and relate to on a personal level, rather than faceless organisations who seek only to profit.

Marketing and public relations became a two-way exchange, rather than a one-way broadcast. Sure, spending millions on a traditional marketing campaign (buying up TV ad slots, posting ads on billboards, setting up live events in public) was and still is a good way to reach as many people as possible.

However, in this age you’re likely to reach nearly as many people if you post something people find particularly funny or clever, causing it to be shared around like a virtual wildfire.

As more and more businesses rely on social media to spread and maintain their reputation, so does the market for tech-savvy dedicated social media managers continue to grow. While many are hired to be full employees of a company, just as many social media managers work as freelancers or consultants, bringing their expertise to businesses struggling with promoting themselves so that they can get those coveted instant likes.

Facebook and Instagram aren’t the be-all-and-end-all of online communication, though. Many of the younger generations, having witnessed firsthand the many data leaks and privacy scandals that ravaged sites like Facebook, as well as the savage flame wars that erupted on Twitter, are becoming much more skeptical of communicating on these platforms.

Increasingly worried about their privacy, they are leaving major social media sites like Facebook for sites like Snapchat, where ephemerality reigns and users don’t need to worry about potentially embarrassing content being preserved for everyone to see years afterwards.

There are also many virtual communities and networks that can’t truly be leveraged for marketing purposes, like you would in Facebook or Twitter. Many forums and bulletin boards (such as “Something Awful” or “Sufficient Velocity”) have audiences so niche that marketing in those areas would be nearly pointless.

Still, social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have made themselves one of the most widely-used platforms of global discourse. They certainly aren’t going away anytime soon. Any business looking to get their name heard would kely find the attention they were seeking for in this global digital forum.