In a world where there are hundreds of ways to stay connected to your network, it’s almost impossible to remember life without social media.  This year has certainly been a year full of noteworthy social media advancements and achievements. Women across the world couldn’t be happier with the explosion of Pinterest, and who can forget Facebook’s $500m acquisition of Instagram? As another year comes to a close, let’s count down some of 2012’s big social media moments (in random order).

10. Justin Timberlake bought an ownership stake in MySpace in hopes to restore its relevance and help it make the comeback of a lifetime

9. Facebook introduces Timeline and mandates the new layout mandatory as of January 2012 – The goal of the new layout is to help tell a story through a personal or brand page

8. Instagram grew rapidly in 2012 despite its actual 2010 launch date, and now has over 100 million active users

7. The highest number of likes on a photo on Facebook was set at over 2.1 million

6.  The record for highest number of retweets on Twitter was set at 800K retweets

5. The Facebook/ Instagram acquisition became one of the largest deals seen by a web company, costing nearly $500 million

4. Nielsen announced that Google+ became the fastest growing social media site in 2012 in their annual social media report, and is expected to attract over 400 million users by the end of 2012

3. Facebook became a publicly traded company in May and was valued at over $100 billion, making it the largest tech IPO in US history

2. Pinterest hit 10 million U.S monthly unique visitors faster than any independent site in history

1. Live tweeting became exceedingly popular – Spikes in twitter traffic/ and tweets per minute were seen during the London Olympics, political events, American Music Awards and Oscars, and many other events worldwide

Can you remember any other social media highlights from 2012? Share your thoughts in the comment section below!