There is a different YOU in each social network website

A look into human behavior across social media and why we use more than one

If you count your top 5 applications, how many of them are social network apps? I bet for most of us, the answer is at least 3 out of 5. Although, it could easily be reduced to one, we choose to have them all and act differently on each of them.

Why do we use three different applications even though we can do and perceive the same things from only one of them? Is it social network’s success or is it something to do with ourselves?

To give an example, lets take Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Even though there are very clear differences between them and they motivate their users in different ways, for most of the cases one can do them all in Facebook. For instance, I can post an artistic photo to Facebook instead of Instagram or I can write a status on Facebook but I choose to reflect my sarcastic side on Twitter.

If we merge those three apps and create one new app would it be preferred? I guess not and I am sure there is dozens of unsuccessful attempts.

But what is it that keeps us using different social media sources in our daily ‘online’ life? Is it because we all know what to do in each of them separately? Yeah sure, as if there is a guidance. No, there is not. We are free with our actions. We create different set of actions for each of them explicitly as we continuously adapt ourselves to different social media environments.

Can we say that we reflect our different sides of our personalities on each social media networks?

We really do and we are very conservative about not changing our actions once we develop them. As we build up a personality on each social media site, we tend to maintain them and be loyal to our persona and to our very own community that we have created. This is why, a type of user (out of hundreds) is only sharing serious news on Twitter, posts almost nothing to Facebook and post photos of having cocktails on Instagram. That user acts differently on each social media app and these personalities almost never intersect.

For the users, their understanding of private and public changes with different mediums of sharing. As if sharing a delicious dinner is too private for Facebook but it is ok for Instagram. But who says that? Are we controlled by the community we create.

We create these different personalities for different social media websites/apps, we create our own audiences and act upon them. And try not to fail (or judged by) them with anything unusual. Sounds familiar? Moreover, we switch from one to another before we even know it. It is something we cannot do on our daily life. We create our own community, 
consciously or unconsciously develop a behaviour then start to inform/possess others with our own ideas and liked by others. No wonder why we are addicted.

And I believe one of the worst part about this is, as we develop these behaviours with our very own community we start to receive and convey same set of actions. As we approve others and liked by others we feel more satisfied. But this puts our minds in a box. We all start to think in the same direction. So, at the end we have these strict different personalities for each social network websites and we cannot/don’t want to change it anymore.

Have you ever looked your friend’s news feed on Facebook? It looks different right?