February 4^th 2004 was the date a handful of Harvard students would experience the beginnings of what the future of the web would come to look like.

The Harvard Crimson picked up the story, and announced that Mark Zuckerberg’s thefacebook.com was going viral.

“As of yesterday afternoon, Zuckerberg said over 650 students had registered to use thefacebook.com. He said that he anticipated that 900 students would have joined the site by this morning.”

Zuckerberg then went on to explain just how happy he was with the uptake so far.

It is pretty evident, if you have seen one of his first interviews that certainly not Zuckerberg, nor anyone else could have predicted that just a dozen years later it would be one of the most salient Internet forces to have ever been created.

Since then, many have emerged to join it, play in the white spaces, and carve out niches in an attempt to replicate its success.

The result? Nearly a third of the world’s population are, in one form or another a member of a social networking site.

And with an estimated three-quarters of users saying social media influences their buying decisions, and nearly 90% of U.S companies using either Twitter, Facebook or Instagram – the next stage in its lifecycle for brands, is to unlock the estimated $1.3tn in value that lies within these virtual boarders.

Jan Rezab, Founder and Chairman of Socialbakers, one of the world’s largest social analytics firms, wants to guide brands to true social media effectiveness.

By helping optimize and monitor businesses social media effectiveness, he believes that helping them unlock the value shouldn’t be a problem.

This isn’t simply an analytics dashboard however, but rather, a full stack offering that spans as wide as helping companies pick content, to providing insight into how effect their two way conversational dialogue is with their followers.

For more on true social media effectiveness, listen to the podcast above.