Facebook Turns 20

History was made in Room H33.

That’s the dorm room where Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes created Facebook.

The OG social network celebrates its 20^th birthday this Sunday.

Facebook shaped how social media works (and how it makes money). If you’ve scrolled a news feed, scoped someone’s timeline, or liked a post today, you can thank Facebook. It gave brands and digital marketers some of their first forays into social metrics, audience segmentation and direct user interactions.

From College Kids to … Everyone

Facebook’s impact on marketing, modern society and the very course of humanity is undeniable.

But the brand has not been without its controversies as it’s shifted and grown. “The Facebook” was originally only for Harvard students before expanding to anyone with a .edu email address and then the entire world.  

Since then, it’s faced major controversies around politics and privacy. Its origin story received the Hollywood treatment with “The Social Network.” After acquiring other social and tech companies like Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus, Facebook reorganized and rebranded as Meta. Google, which also recently celebrated a milestone birthday, made a similar move in establishing Alphabet as its parent company in a hybrid branding structure.

For its part, Meta is keeping relatively quiet about its birthday. Two decades is an eon in the tech world, and Facebook’s staying power speaks to just how influential it’s been.

Today, other social networks may have snatched users’ attention, but their features and functions are all inevitably compared to what Facebook built.

And it’s still incredibly influential. Facebook is the world’s most popular social media platform, with more than 3 billion users.