I want to share a secret about myself – I am addicted to Facebook.
Every morning, when I wake up, the first thing I do is I reach for my phone and open Facebook. I spend at least 15 min first of all checking how many likes I got on the last photo I posted and from whom. Secondly, I scroll through the news feed to see what other people posted - pictures of cute kids, cats, dogs, happy faces, weird faces, and sometimes very disturbing stuff.
Question – why do I keep doing this every morning when I know very well that it’s a waste of time?
I decided to do some research on this subject. Turns out, I am not the only one wasting my precious morning time. 80% of smartphone users do the same thing - they check the social apps on their phones before brushing their teeth.
We all know how Facebook started – as a social network site for students at Harvard. It had only 4,000 users at that time. Now it’s used by 1.6 billion people across the world.
Maybe it would never grow beyond the size of a student network if smart marketers didn’t figure how to take advantage of it.
Why do so many people use Facebook?
There is this type of people who post 5-6 selfies of themselves in a day. I used to do that too. “Hey, here is me, driving my brand new car to work”, “Me, working so hard at my desk”, “Gym time – Can you believe I just did 20 sit-ups? Look at my abs”. What else? A Duckface Selfie. The list goes on.
The success of social media is based on humans’ need for attention. People simply don’t get enough attention in their real life. It’s abnormal to seek constant attention in real life. But it’s absolutely normal in social media – everyone does it. Facebook and Instagram create an ideal environment for obsession with self-image. The popularity of one’s image in social media is measured by the number of “likes”, “followers” and comments. It becomes a competition - who'll get the most number of likes?
Guess what? It was all designed on purpose by some clever people who invented this “sharing” culture. They encourage us to tell more about our private lives. You open Facebook and the first question you see is “What’s on your mind?” or “Where are you right now?” or “Who are you with?”
All details of our personal life that we share through the social media is a goldmine for advertisers. They pay a lot of money to get access to that data. The more we share about ourselves the easier it is for them to market to us their goods.
We think it’s free to use social media. But the cost of this gigantic platform, the salaries of developers, the data centers space are all paid by the dollars we’ll spend later on movie tickets, clothes, restaurants and vacations advertised to us. That’s what makes the social media profitable and fuels its growth.
The second reason why social media is so popular is Curiosity… that killed the cat.
Nowadays humans’ attention span has become very short. In fact, a recent study found a goldfish has a longer attention span than humans. Why? It’s all thanks to smartphones and information overload.
Nobody wants to read a long article, especially if there are no big colorful pictures in it. No-one wants to watch a YouTube video if it's longer than two minutes or if it doesn't make us laugh or cry every 10 seconds.
And if you think about this, the content these days is not really about the message, it’s about the presentation.
Everything we see on social media is fascinating, exciting, eye-popping. The stories compete for our attention. Eventually we become satiated, desensitized. And we also very quickly forget everything we read or watched on social media.
Remember the photo of a dress that went viral? The dress that divided the entire planet? Half of the world was saying the dress was white and gold, and the other half claimed it was blue and black. Couples were breaking up because they couldn’t agree. Newspapers forgot about politics and focused on the dress. Scientists were doing studies about the dress color. The buzz around the dress lasted for a couple of weeks. And then everyone forgot about it.
What does this example teach us? The most viral content gets forgotten.
If I wake you up in the middle of a night and ask you what was the story of Romeo and Juliette all about, would you be able to tell me right away?
And if I wake you up in the middle of a night, and ask you to share with me any of the “45 incredibly amazing facts that you didn’t know can blow your mind” that you yesterday read about on Facebook, would you remember any of them?
Exactly.
The stories on social media are like fast food. They look, smell and taste really nice the moment we consume them. But do they leave those good nutrients in our system that make us happier and smarter?
Does the social media encourage us to explore the world, ponder, analyze, seek answers and finally create something of our own?
No, all it does is make us want more fun. Addictive fun.
And that is why I am addicted to Facebook.
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