What do we mean by Success – Blog 11: Our Social Media?

Social Media has very rapidly become a part of every way that we love our daily lives. For something that we use multiple times a day, can we use it as a measure of how successful we are in life? This is what we are going to be looking at in today’s “What do we mean by Success?” blog!

Hello and Welcome to Sweeney’s Blogs!

Today’s blog is the eleventh blog in the “What do we mean by Success?” series and is all about our Social Media! Social Media plays an integral part in the lives of people across the globe. People us it to catch up on news, upload photos of their food, socialist with friends and family and more! Success and Social Media are things that we bring up quite a lot in our lives, is there a link between the two?

For a series of applications that have such a broad range of usage, would it be fair to use them as a determiner of how successful or not we are in life? Does being a bug hit on Facebook or Snapchat directly correlate to the success that we acquire in life? There is no right answer to this question, of course, it is all down to your own opinion and belief, but it is something that we are going to be looking at in a little bit more depth.

So, what do I mean when I say, do we see Social Media as a form of Success? Let me give you an example. Let’s say that you have 3,000 followers on Instagram and your friend has 250. Does the fact that you have 2,750 more followers than your friend mean that you are more successful than them? What do you think?

Now some people would say yes, but in a different way to others. A nice angle that I like to take would be, yes he does seem to be more successful than his friend on Instagram. The on Instagram part is very important there. We used their Social Media to compare their success on Social Media, not in life, make sense?

Now, for instance, let’s say I put a post on Facebook that gets 30 likes, then somebody else puts a photo up and gets 40, what then? Are they more successful? Their posts may appear as more successful, on face value, but are they really?

If we take a look at the two different posts, what do we see? Is the topic the same? The intended target audience? Is it a “react collector”? A react collector is a term that I have made up for posts that main purpose is to get a reaction. Let’s say you put a photo up of a puppy and then compare that to a longer text post talking about news, the puppy will get more likes, agreed? I like to think of them as an example of a “react collector” as their sole purposes is to attract attention and get reactions.

The topic of how many interactions and reactions a post gets, can stem from a lot of different variables, such as posting. What time you post a post can have a very large impact on how many reactions it gets. If you post at night time, only the people awake will see it. If you post in the morning, you may have more of a chance to have more people to see and interact with it.

Just because people see a post, it does not always mean that they will react to it remember. Some people will scroll past, some won’t bother to look at it and some will like it, but will not directly interact and show you that they like it. I believe that by looking at all of the factors that link to how successful a post is on Social Media helps us see if it is fair to compare Social Media to our own success.

A common theme that I like to refer back to a lot in this series is that there is no right answer to what success actually means. Granted there is a dictionary definition, but you do not need to use that as a comparison for success in your life. Success means different things to different people, it is a small word with a much larger footprint.

If you use Social Media as a metric to assess whether or not you are successful in life, that is your choice. I am in no position to tell you are wrong or that you have to think of it in a different way. I am a blogger, I discuss the topics and like to add in my own opinion, yes, but I would never directly force my views on anyone.

I’ll bring the question that I asked at the very start as a closing point, can we use Social Media as a way to determine how successful we are in life? What do you think? What does success mean to you? What would you like to see me write about next?

That’s all I want to talk about in today’s blog! What do you all think? Let me know any queries or questions that you have about the blog, or anything related to my page and I will get back to you as soon as I can. All feedback is encouraged on my page so please, don’t be shy!

Thank you all for reading and I hope you have a great day!