As we begin a new year, we thought it would be a good time to look back on some of the things that have happened in the World of social media throughout 2020. Join us as we get all nostalgic!

In the words of Facebook: “2020 will forever be known as the year that changed us all.” It’s also a year when social media really took off, as more and more people went online during lockdown.

At the end of March, we stayed home. The Instagram ‘Stay Home’ sticker was used over 100 million times globally in the first week it launched. Also, in this month, time in group video calls doubled, as people across the World connected through social media.

More than 47 million stories were created with the ‘Support Small Business’ sticker on Instagram and more than 10 million people on Facebook globally have joined new groups created since March to support local businesses.

We rallied for unsung heroes and by the power of social media managed to help Captain Tom Moore (now Sir Tom Moore) raise a staggering £32.8 million in aid of the health services charitable wing, NHS Charities Together. If an image to commemorate this achievement didn’t pop up on your timeline where were you?!

TikTok went viral. Although this is not a channel we use at Social Soda, it would be rude not to highlight that 2020 will forever be the year that TikTok took the World by storm! The app was downloaded almost 115 million times in March, breaking the record for the most app downloads in a quarter EVER!

Instagram responded by creating their own version known as ‘Reels’ and although still relatively new, more and more people are starting to come on board with this. Perhaps we’ll see more Reels in 2021?

Millions of businesses closed their physical doors to reduce the spread of COVID-19 this year, but as the saying goes ‘when one door closes another one opens’ and forward-thinking brands, and businesses took to social media to bring the community together during challenging times.

Despite once been a relatively underused feature, Instagram Live had a huge resurgence in 2020. In April, Facebook and Instagram saw a 40% increase in usage, with views for Instagram Live and Facebook Live doubling in one week.

Audiences were kept captivated with many businesses getting creative with their content. We saw virtual yoga, house tours, makeup tutorials and home baking become regular content. The ability to save Live broadcasts to IGTV also became an invaluable feature to Instagram and the length limit of broadcasts was extended from 60 minutes to a whole 4 hours!

Ever quick off the mark, Instagram has since introduced ways to monetise the Live experience and businesses can now use Live Shopping to add a shoppable product link to their broadcast, and viewers can pay for Instagram Live Badges to tip their favourite creators.

Talking of Instagram, the channel launched pretty much everything you could think of (well it was celebrating its 10th birthday!) To name just a few, the bumper pack of updates included (as previously mentioned) Reels, we also had Guides, Shop, Donation, Food Order and Fundraiser Stories stickers, Pin Post comments, Suggested Posts and if that wasn’t enough, a new homepage layout. We wonder what it’s got in store for 2021?!

2020 will also be the year that every platform released a Stories feature! Already featured on Instagram and Facebook, this year we saw Twitter Fleets, LinkedIn Stories and Pinterest Story Pins all make their debut.

In case you missed it, E-Commerce entered the building and shopping went mainstream. With the dreaded ‘C’ word forcing many businesses to temporarily close their doors, many platforms pushed out new ways to shop on social. As previously mentioned, Instagram introduced a new Shop tab and Pinterest also levelled-up its shopping features.

Sick of seeing old news stories being shared on Facebook? Fear not! The platform created a ‘warning prompt’ to prevent people from sharing news that was, how can we put it, yesterday’s chip paper!

Twitter also had its fair share of updates including the introduction of 140-second-long audio tweets and the option to choose who can reply to your tweets!

And, if it happens to come up in a Zoom quiz over this lockdown period, Harry Potter star Rupert Grint stole David Attenborough’s crown by setting the record for having the fastest time to reach 1 million followers on Instagram. It took him just 4 hours and 1 minute when he introduced his new baby daughter in his first post...1,2,3 aww!

We hope you enjoyed our social media look back over 2020! With plenty of things on the horizon for 2021, there’s no doubt next year’s trip down memory lane will be just as jam packed and interesting!