The psychology behind social media and its unspoken codes

The social media They are a means of social communication that focuses on establishing contact with other members through the Internet. This technological advance has given us the opportunity to forge new relationships that sometimes end up becoming important friends in our lives.

We go back to the mid-90s when they appeared AOL (America Online) and BBS (Bulletin Board System), the first two social websites in the history of the Internet. The first of them has been in the doldrums for years, or as we would say on social media, “it has gone out of style”. And it is that in this changing world few are going to last more than a decade.

The second is a system that in its day allowed the creation of the first forums and today it is still used by millions of people, even though it has been surpassed in functionalities by its competitors.

A Paradigm Shift: The Weirdos

The fact that we all use social networks leads us to think that firstly, if you don't use them you are different from the rest. We can all contrast that in class we have had that classmate who does not have any social profile and we look at him as the "weirdo", since he is not there. the last one, but really perhaps he does not have the need or has not had the opportunity, however this leads us to judge him when sometimes he does not we know.

Social networks are used today more than two hours on average per person, that means we have stopped doing things to spend our time interacting and creating communities on the Internet. What has changed and what motivations have led us to do this?

The motivations we have when giving "Like"

How many times has it happened to us that we have clicked to “Like”, “Share” or “Re-Tweet” someone simply because we want you to remember us or to return the interaction when we upload a photo or share a condition?

Make no mistake, we have all done it more than once.

This fact is because social networks feed our ego and our self-esteem, and in this world where there are more and more individuals, we need to satisfy our needs in some way and stand out above the average to be able to “be someone”.

Social networks give us the opportunity to put on a mask and be someone else (or pretend to be who we are not) or, for example, to create anonymous or fake profiles and make new friends. All these opportunities are used to socialize, an objective that continues to be the original goal of social networks.

Is being "popular" on social media equivalent to being popular in real life?

A computer engineer conducted an experiment a little over a year ago, creating a computer program that performed the action of "Like" to each photo that appeared on his "feed" on Instagram.

That experiment did that:

• Every day I get 30 new followers
• They will invite you to more parties
• More people stopped him on the street because they saw him on Instagram

But the most surprising thing, and that supports the aforementioned theory, is that his friends asked him to upload more photos because they felt obliged to return these "likes" that he had been giving in an automated and non-judgmental way.

Human beings are social animals by nature and in many cases we feel obliged to return the actions received in networks

We can see that same effect applied on Twitter, where people use the technique of massively following other users, hoping that these without knowing them at all will return the interaction, and that works quite well because the ratio is quite high.

By following random users on Twitter, you have a 10-30% return on following depending on the interests of the users. There is the data.

Conclusions

Social networks help increase (or decrease) the ego and self-esteem of its users. Many of those users feel indebted to people who have followed or interacted with them, creating a "code of behavior" that is not written anywhere but has spread on social networks and is accepted by the vast majority of users.

The popularity of people in social networks is transmitted today to reality, obtaining these more power of influence over others.

As last insight, we can say that the online world (Internet, Social networks ...) and the offline world (real life) are coming together more and more and will end up being treated as a single entity.