Recently, a friend of mine and I were talking about social media, feeling less tech-savvy and overwhelmed by the new features that frequently become standard. We both wanted to more actively share our lives with others, but also didn’t feel terribly confident that we could pull it off.
In my case, I have been on Facebook since I was 12 (shhh) and Instagram since its inception. When I first joined Facebook, I was a part of a tight community of real friends, family members and maybe students I saw in the hallway at school. I frequently updated my status to let everyone know what I had just eaten or to post angsty song lyrics. Besides chatting with my friends after school, there wasn’t much else too it. On Instagram, the features were limited to putting filters on photos (I don’t believe there were any other editing features) and posting them to what I didn’t fully understand was a profile, on a platform I didn’t think would become so popular.
Since then, I grew up and so did social media. Slow, incremental updates have transformed these platforms into something that only resembles their initial form in the abstract. Now that social media has become the standard, there are ways to use it more and less effectively - businesses often have entire departments dedicated to managing their image on it. The game is now much more risky than before. However, it is also more advantageous; if one keeps up with new features and trends, one can exploit them to increase their visibility. Aside from verified accounts, it is also to the users’ advantage that they are all on the same playing field, thus facilitating and fast-tracking networking and self-advocation. If you want a certain kind of representation for yourself or your business, you can make it happen.
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