Teenage social norms on social media by application:
GENERAL
- If a new acquaintance follows you, you're supposed to follow back--otherwise, that acquaintance can't blossom into a friendship.
- If a friend messages you on any of the below mediums, you're supposed to write back. If you don't, it makes for a rocky interaction the next time you see that "friend."
- If anyone tags you on a social media site, you have to like and comment.
- And if someone plays an inside joke and you know it, you have to interact with that post somehow (like as a minimum).
- The bottom line is, it's all about the interactions! On many of these apps, a certain amount of likes are necessary for the post to be considered worth it. As I mentioned above, sometimes on Instagram, if a teenager doesn't feel he/she received enough likes on a photo, he/she will remove it.
- You can only change your profile picture every so often. You don't want to make it look like you're too into yourself, but you also do have to change your profile from time-to-time to really make a statement about who you are. I've also heard that a teenager is supposed to collect more likes on each subsequent profile picture or risk losing hurting his/her status on social media.
- Birthdays--this is so interesting it should have its own blog post. Allow me to be brief... Because these apps want data on our teens, they all ask for birthday. Many--most notably Facebook--then display a user's birthday to his/her following. Depending on your relationship with the user, you're expected to respond in a certain way. For example, if it's a friend, you can comment on Facebook. If it's a good friend, you should text. And if it's one of your besties, you send a flattering photo collage to Instagram (and Facebook) to show off your friendship with the birthday boy/girl.
- Likes are EVERYTHING. As I mentioned above, the amount of likes may determine whether the post lives or dies on this platform. The goal is triple digits!
- In the words of one student, "If you have 199 likes you may feel stressed or irritated until you see 200 on your screen."
- Many teens meticulously schedule when they're going to post an image to maximize likes.
- On Instagram, unlike snapchat, you limit your posts. You don't want to "spam" your followers and you want to make sure each time you post, your followers are ready to hit like!
- Instagram Aesthetic--your aesthetic is essentially your theme. Teens pick something to focus on and only post photos that fit within that theme. That can be the content of the image, the filter, the style of photo, etc. What teens are going for is a pretty landing page when friends or potential friends click on their profile. If you need an example, look at King Kylie. This means that on Instagram, teens are frequently clicking on each other's profiles and evaluating a body of work, not just perusing photos.
- Filters matter. You don't want your photos to look too edited, but you also want them to look good to get likes. It's a challenge, but it's worth all the time and effort if you get likes! Sometimes you get respect by going with #nofilter.
- Teens literally create a second Instagram account so that they can break all the rules above.
- You don't use your real name for this, and you keep the account locked; it's just for close friends and likes don't matter.
- The pictures tend to be less than flattering and sometimes downright inappropriate.
- When I asked a student about "finstas" she responded, "you want people to see what your real life is like, right?" This quotation proves that on "rinsta" your posts are not supposed to reflect your actual life.
- Nevertheless, teenagers use their "finsta" to like their "rinsta" posts to boost their likes on their real Instagram account.
- I know one girl who made a "finsta" with the sole purpose of posting things that poked fun at her mother.
- Streaks are EVERYTHING. In the words of a student, "the higher the streak, the cooler. [Teens] exchange meaningless pictures... in order to keep the streak going." When I ask students what they're doing on their phone at 8 AM, they tell me they're keeping their streaks. Many teens wake up in the morning and send snaps to keep streaks going.
- Teens usually don't even view the snaps they receive for the full amount of time they have. That's because they have too many to get through. If someone sends a snap to keep a streak alive, great, you click through to the next one.
- Everyone agrees screenshotting is really uncool, but everyone does it. I once asked a room full of 11th graders how many of them had received a screenshot of someone else's social media post in the last week. More than half of their hands went up.
- What goes on your story has to be carefully crafted and you can't put too many pictures up in a day or your followers will get annoyed. Nevertheless, you can post way more frequently on Snapchat than you can on Instagram. It's feast or famine on Snapchat. If you don't have anything going on, you don't post much to snapchat. If you're doing something cool, you post as much as you can without annoying your followers. But rest assured, even when you're posting a lot, you're also viewing a lot. Teens don't miss a thing on snapchat.
- If you send someone a photo that you're going to post to your story, it's practically an insult to the person you sent it to. That's because you have to assume that everyone who is on Snapchat is looking at your story!
- There's a feature on snapchat where you can check who is viewing your stories, teens use it... frequently.
- Finally, teens seem to be okay with the fact that when school events occur, they all snapchat each other the same thing.
TWITTER
- I've already written my own opinion on how teens use this app. See here, here and here.
- Twitter Ratio - Teens think they need to have more accounts following them than accounts that they follow. In other words, more people have to care about your tweets than other people's tweets that you care about.
- For most teens, the point of posting a tweet is to garner favorites. One student said that she felt like "the goal of Twitter for [her] was trying to be funny or clever, and favorites just determined if that goal was met." Favorites are important because they deliver validation, but that makes Retweets even more desirable and affirming. A Retweet is when someone moves your tweet to all of his/her followers too. This validation drives teens to shoot for RTs more so than favorites. Needless to say, when shooting for RTs, teens aren't posting things that would make their parents and teachers proud.
- In fact, if teenagers used Twitter the way adults do--to share interests and to network--they would stand out. I know one student who uses his Twitter this way and his friends tease him by calling it his "business twitter."
- Because Twitter's stream moves so quickly, it's harder to get lots of RTs and favorites in this medium; and as a result, teens are leaving Twitter in big numbers... but they're still holding on to "Private Twitter"
- Yes, teens also make two Twitter accounts. The goal of the Private Twitter is much like the "finsta" I mentioned above. You lock your account and only let in a small group of friends (approx. 20-40). In this space, you can tweet anything.
- Often this space is used for inappropriate comments; you say things here that you can't say on other social media accounts or even things you can't say in real life. These are your unedited opinions. I've heard students say that this is the space where you're "supposed to" argue with your followers. Others derive entertainment just by watching people clash on Private Twitter.
- In fact, Private Twitter accounts are becoming more common amongst teenagers than public twitter accounts. As I mentioned above, I think Twitter is losing its appeal to teenagers, but Private Twitter is not; and--in my opinion--it's bad for their relationships.
- Frankly, Facebook is going out of style with teenagers, mostly because their parents are taking over that space. They're running to Instagram and Snapchat. Because of this fact, I'll just leave this category with one bullet: a direct quote from a former student, "I know two people who posted on Facebook what college they decided to go to and didn't even tell their parents because they thought they would have just seen their post."
- Believe it or not, text is going out of style with our teenagers too. I've already written about group text--which is not going out of style. You can read that here. Allow me to conclude this category with a quotation from a former student as well: "People are on their social media often enough that you don't have to go ahead and text them... they will see it."
A parting thought: one of the fascinating, fun things about social media is that it's free-flowing and fast-moving. However, every interaction on these applications exists indefinitely. Friends can screenshot posts, they can go back and see old posts, and the applications themselves store every post. Teenagers admit that they "stalk" each other on these networks--poring through old photos and posts to judge/evaluate a peer. That's a scary thought when you think about the norms discussed above and the fact that over the years the norms will change, and the users will continue posting to keep up. That means hundreds (if not thousands) of posts that can be uncovered at any time by friends--old and new--for the rest of a teenager's life.
