Breaking Social Media Norms

This proved to be more difficult than I was expecting…

This past week, I tried 2 different types of social media experiments in which I broke traditional “norms” set on social media. The methods I tried were oversharing, in which I massively posted way more than any normal person would, and changing the subject, in which I would comment on someone’s post starting a completely new conversation that had nothing to do with the original post.

The way I went about performing these experiments were through oversharing on Snapchat and posting comments on Facebook. Unfortunately I did not get the reactions I was hoping for.

On Snapchat I posted a massive amount of pictures and videos to my story while also sending every single one of those pictures and videos to my top friends. While I was expecting people to be like, “shut up Alex,” or ignore me, instead I got more responses to direct Snapchats than I usually do…

On Facebook, I decided to specifically target an older generation when I was commenting on posts with a change of subject. (My parents — just before my generation). Oddly enough, I had direct replies from those comments and those individuals changed the subject happily!