Netiquette — Cause Society Said So.
Netiquette dictates how it is we should behave online, but should there really be separate rules?
Consider this, would you really want to spend your time interacting with a business that perpetually ignored you, or feigning interest in the minute details of your friends lives? Shouldn’t online netiquette be a reflection of real life etiquette?
Technology’s ever-changing capabilities demand for an ever-changing “internet rule book” because the anonymity of hiding behind a screen allows people to be more courageous or overzealous than they would be in real life — despite the fact that you will always leave an online footprint.
I feel like online presences should be treated the same way someone would treat real life, not social media.
Businesses should curate genuine authentic presences, and develop a brand personality for themselves online.
Businesses should never spam their followings with posts and self-promotion. Rather they should consider 70% of their online presence to be engagement (retweets, replies, etc), and only 30% promotion. Posts should always be relevant, relatable, polite, and professional in order to continually and successfully engage a brand following.
Compare this to curating our own personal social media pages. We spend our time showing the greatest aspects of our lives, sharing our opinions and interacting with our friends. Where businesses are required to interact with their followings in order to be successful, our personal accounts do not obligate us to interact with anybody or anything. However, society has reached a point where we feel obligated to engage with our friends’ posts, even if the content is not relevant to us — as if it somehow reflects the degree of friendship you share. Would we really do this in real life? We’ve all been there, scrolling through our insta timelines, seeing a friends post, thinking “awe that’s the third puppy post this week”, but still feeling obligated to like it….
Society is continually determining what is acceptable as online “netiquette” and it differs between businesses and individuals, online and real life.
The following video outlines the importance of online netiquette, given that once something is posted — it never goes away:
Source: YouTube
