It’s 6:30 a.m. and your alarm has just gone off. You hit snooze, just to have a few minutes to check Snapchat before you have to get ready for school, only to see one of your friends blowing up their story with videos from a concert from the night before. In irritation, you shut off your phone and throw it on the floor because, let’s be honest, is it really beneficial to your well-being to watch the 10 minutes of concert that your friend went to? Let’s dive into the good, the bad and the ugly of the unwritten rules of social media.
Rule number one: Never is it necessary to spam an Instagram or Snapchat story for a friend’s birthday. It’s annoying, and a waste of time. While putting a few pictures on your story to celebrate your friend’s birthday is fine, anything more than five is just excessive. Junior Norman Bayigamba said, “To some degree I guess spamming bothers me a little bit but to post for your friend’s birthday is genuine, but posting 20 pictures is a bit obnoxious.”
Rule number two: There’s never a need to put something you posted on your main Instagram feed on your story for more likes and comments. Chances are that people pay more attention to their feed than Instagram stories, and nobody needs to see your post more than once. The majority of Instagram stories usually consist of something such as ‘like and comment,’ so adding another story to someone’s feed like that will not affect anyone, it would just give someone another story to click through.
Contrary to popular belief, people don’t actually pay attention to how many likes and comments you have, so advertising your post at all, whether it be on your Snapchat or Instagram story, or through text, it isn’t necessary.
Rule number three: Do not ever post more than once in a day. If there are two occasions happening on the same day, a good rule of thumb to follow is to just post for one of them, but if you really can’t decide, don’t post at all. If you do post twice or more in one day. “People will think you’re being annoying and blowing up your feed too much,” freshman Nikki Altman said.
Rule number four: When you go to a concert, you do not need to post a video from every second of it. Concerts can make for an exciting night, and it’s perfectly fine to let the world know that you went to one. However, after a few videos or pictures, people get the point. “If we see one Snapchat we understand the point of a concert, but if you spam it just gets annoying” freshman Gillian Berman said.
