The end of a year marks a time for reflection and looking back over what has been achieved in the  past twelve months. 2013 has been an exceptional year for social media, with Twitter making an appearance on the stock market, the effects of social media on the markets and growing usage across the globe, social media has gone from strength to strength.

So, what were the biggest social media moments of 2013?

Twitter has remained at the forefront of the world’s news output. There were 27 million tweets about the Boston Marathon bombings in April and the death of Nelson Mandela prompted 95,000 tweets a minute. Twitter also floated on the stock market but caused controversy by having no female board members. So, earlier in this month Twitter appointed its first female board member, Marjorie Scardino, the former CEO of Pearson. Scardino’s background in publishing will come in handy as the company moves towards becoming a major news and entertainment publisher.

Facebook saw a couple of set-backs with the roll out of its new timeline design delayed indefinitely and comments like “back to the drawing board” being bandied about. 2013 also saw the launch of hashtags on Facebook making networking much easier on site. They also introduced the 20% rule meaning that in order to promote posts on Facebook, the text of an image in a post cannot make up more than 20% of the entire image. The company began to recover from its slow start on the stock market, and offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion, were refused and are now taking them on head to head with Instagram direct.

Speaking of Snapchat, they’ve had a pretty successful year and played a vital part in social media becoming much more visual. At the end of 2012 there were plenty of predictions that platforms like Pinterest and YouTube would become increasingly popular due to lowering attention spans and the popularity of the visual. Snapchat has capitalised on that and become for many the new way to text. With an impending ferocious battle with Instagram Direct 2014 could be an interesting year for the app.

In 2013 Pinterest changed its image and updated the functionality on the site making it much more user friendly. LinkedIn Today updated to LinkedIn Pulse trying to function in a similar way to some of the other social media giants, focusing on sharing and getting people to interact with the site much more.

Overall, 2013 has seen a huge surge in the use of social media and the big companies are taking steps to making it more and more accessible. We are on target for 2017 when it has been predicted that 1 in 4 in the world will be on social media. Happy New Year!