The different personas we use on social media
Each social media platform comes with a new online persona
Social media has been taking over our lives since middle school. We begged our parents to let us get MySpace, and when that wasn’t cool anymore we graduated to Facebook. Flash forward ten years and there are too many platforms to count. While Snapchat and Instagram are likely the most used these days by college students, we all have more accounts than just those, and with that, we all have different personas for each social media account. If you claim to be a one-faced, singluar-persona on every single outlet you use, you’re lying. That simply is not doable. And it’s not fun either… this is the one place you can actually have different personas and not get called two-faced for it.
We’ll start here because this is a necessary account to have for any college student to survive. It’s where you keep in touch with your family and friends back home, where you keep track of your new friends, and where you post important updates. On here, we’re real. We are (usually) respectful because we know Aunt Sue is watching us very closely. This is where we make a new photo album every year with some cheesy title. We share endless links and videos to show the world we are activists who have passions, unlike the “lazy” millennials they think we are. We stalk the cutie we just met and make all our friends validate us and confirm his or her attractiveness. We untag ourselves from (sloppy) drinking photos and change our last names to our middle ones, so employers can’t find us. We hide our birth year so our favorite bartender can’t stalk us and find out we’re underage. This is where we’re ~professionally~ real.
This is where we say anything and everything that comes to mind. Whether it’s funny, a rant, a subtweet, what have you, we post it. And we seek validation through it by hoping someone likes it or even better, retweets us. We can scroll through our feed for hours on end because some accounts just post the realist shit, and it’s entertaining when your Professor is going on their fourth tangent of the lecture.
multitasking
Snapchat
…is the best because sending pictures and simultaneously chatting is way more fun than plain texting. It’s a good place to send super ugly selfies to your best friends or to be basic and send a dog filter snap to your crush. Having a fire emoji next to someone’s name is amazing because streaks are hella important. This is where we post basically pointless stories for 100 people to see but act like they’re important to share anyway. It’s also the go-to media platform for adding people you meet at parties… and then waking up the next day and being confused about who this rando is in your story.
Tumblr
This is the realest a platform can get. Although it’s basically just blogging through photos, they have so much depth and meaning to them. If you want someone to know your brand, direct them to your Tumblr url. But then again, our Tumblrs are so personal it’s pretty rare we give it out to just anyone. It’s the best place to post when you’re sad, because you get to release those emotions without people getting annoyed of your tweets taking up their timeline. This is also the most important username you could come up with. In your entire life.
It’s like Twitter but better. It’s the most entertaining way to stalk people next to Facebook. How many followers do they have? What type of photos do they post? Are they basic and only post going out girl squad photos or do they add some artsy stuff in there? Does your crush have a cool insta or is he lame on it? Instagram is a blessing and curse. We get to show how good we looked on a night of going out, how much fun we’re having, or share some experience with our hundreds of followers. But on the flip side, we are constantly comparing ourselves to girls that are hotter, have cooler posts, and more followers, which should not happen because we’re all cool and beautiful. But it’s still number one.
insta posts are for the squad
Finsta
If you haven’t joined the Finsta (fake Instagram) movement yet, you are hardcore missing out. This is where you actually want less followers, because you are so real on finsta you don’t want people knowing how crazy you are. It’s the best place to share with your closest friends about your sadness, your recent sexual encounters, and other forms of rants. You would probably never overlap your posts on here with your real Instagram, because they’re just too intense. It’s by far the best social media trend thus far.
Maybe you use all of these, maybe you use a couple, or maybe you don’t understand social media at all. It is probably one the biggest wastes of time, but we stick with it anyway. Here’s to being basic and not giving a care in the world about it.