Are we being too easily influenced by social media?

Ten years ago social media was barely an uttering, something some of us were on, some of us weren’t. Now it has become a standard among 2.46 billion people.

Can you remember what it felt like to not have to check your phone every five minutes? Perhaps what it was like to not even be able to access the internet on your phone? Or… never have a phone at all?

Each generation will have had a different experience with the growing technological advancements, but for me, my first phone was a tiny little pink clamshell. It made calls, it barely made texts and it played one game. I thought it was brilliant, I used to clip it over the pocket of my jeans and I thought I looked really cool. I had it when I turned 11 and started Secondary School so I could call my mum if I needed to.

Switch forward by about 13 years and now I have the iPhone 8 Plus, I have a MacBook, an iPad; even my games consoles allow me to browse the internet. I can get to social media anywhere, anytime. And hey, it’s even my day job too, it really does follow me around.

So the question for this blog is are we allowing ourselves to become too easily influenced by social media?

I ran a poll on Twitter to ask if you thought you were influenced by social media, 77% said they were, leaving 23% to not be influenced.

I recently wrote a post about being addicted to our phones, these two kind of come hand in hand. Smartphones give us an ease of access to social media. But the content we’re seeing on these platforms is starting to heavily influence us and guide our decisions. Anyone can now post their opinion and gain followers from it, this is new, this is something that in the past only someone with fame has been able to achieve when gathering an audience.

Influencers

With online influencers growing by the second and brands using social media to do most of their marketing, it’s hard to escape being influenced. If someone like Zoella wears a coat that you like, will you then look for a similar coat? I’ve done it myself, I saw a hairstyle I liked on a YouTube video recently and now I’ve got it in my head to have my hair cut in a similar way. I don’t see a problem with liking an item of clothing you see online, but I do see an issue with trying to match yourself to those on your feeds. We are all individual and unique, but social media lets us be whoever we want to be. We can be someone totally new, or we can just cut out the parts we don’t like about ourselves and keep the rest.

It’s easy to forget the lives of the rich and famous on social media aren’t always as they seem. I often wonder how Zoella is so thin when she seems to eat out all the time, but then that’s because we only see what she wants us to see. It may not be deliberate, but it’s definitely altering our perceptions and showing us something that isn’t really true all of the time. We are being brainwashed into thinking what we see is what we get, but actually everything is altered. Filters, photoshop, angles, lighting, everything can be changed and it makes it hard to really trust things.

Of course influencers aren’t new, we’ve had them around us through the press and media for years and years. Why does social media make it any different? Well of course it makes this all a lot easier to access. Now you can watch live streams and see Snapchats from celebs and know what they’re up to. This information is now all the more accessible and easier to be sucked in by.

Addiction

We have become glued to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, we have to post every update. I’m not excluding myself from this, I’m just the same. But as social media users, we feel the need to keep everyone who follows us constantly in the loop. Do we really need to? Probably not. I have a different life online, with over 7K followers combined on all of my platforms, I feel popular. In reality I have friends of course, but I don’t have a wild amount of people to be social with outside of work. Social media offers me a place to be me and to be liked for it.

Am I being brainwashed by these online worlds? Are they making me feel glued to my phone instead of looking up? Sure, a little, of course they do. But they’re also offering me something, I am getting opportunities from my social accounts and I feel like I’m respected there. With most millennial getting their news from Facebook and Twitter, anything could be put out there and it would be taken as fact. Clickbait is a huge issue, you can’t tell anymore what’s real and what isn’t. It’s so easy to influence people using fake news and titles that you know will grab certain audiences. We can really tailor our marketing now to hit exactly the right people.

Followers

I spoke to my mum about her views on social media addiction and the first thing she said to me was her hate of the word followers. To her, followers link to a cult, to others, followers are a way to gage the success of social channels. As analytics become more and more popular it is much better to look at your accounts engagement to judge how well your posts are doing. But we can’t help but weight things up by our follower count too.

The word follower compared to using the word ‘subscriber’ or ‘reader’ does have a certain cult feel to it. How do we know that our followers are genuine and not just people who have clicked the button just to get noticed themselves? Is the content we’re creating really reaching genuine readers or are we just being put in a pot filled with people trying to climb to the top?

Suddenly we all have huge audiences that will potentially listen to what we are saying and be influenced by it. There is a power in this that a lot of us don’t know how to properly use. We can advertise, influence and instruct our viewers and that is scary. If I say I really enjoyed a book, is that going to influence others to read it? I’m not suggesting this power is always bad, I love being able to help readers find books they love. But I’m suggesting that there is a lot of responsibility to portray the right message and use the influence you have as an online user to spread good and not bad.

So are we being too influenced by social media?

If you use social media and you think you’re not influenced at all by social media, then you must be lying. Any user will have at one point or another been influenced by something they have seen online. Be it a Pinterest recipe, a photo on Instagram or a story you’ve read on Twitter. It is then up to us whether or not we become too influenced online. There’s a point where we can stop living through our eyes and live through out phones instead, this is when we need to take a step back.

Technology is constantly changing and it isn’t going to slow down. Of course it will be adapted into our lives if it isn’t already. It is always moving onto the next thing, the way we do things is always going to be new and innovative. Consumption has changed and it is now a very online world, but we just need to make sure we don’t get too caught up in this. We need to remember to make our own decisions and not be led by what we see online. Sure, we should have fun with it and it’s fine to be influenced, as long as we know when to shut our tech down and also live in the real world.