How Social Media Usage Is Evolving

Social Media is a constantly evolving medium for those in Gen Z to express themselves and share tidbits of their lives, but sometimes it feels overwhelming to keep up. Iconic social media persona, Emma Chamberlain, has proved that she is well-versed and ready to take on the trends. Her pages are organically intriguing and very “cool girl” but understanding why takes a deeper level of examination and understanding of social media engagement trends as a whole.

Some of the strategies that Emma regularly uses on Instagram are coined as “keeping Instagram casual” and how to avoid the need for a “social media detox.” Everything about her is meant to come off as effortless - her appearance, her posing, and her lifestyle included. But, as trends move towards these low effort personas, the question is begged: Can social media ever really be casual? And what does it do to your psyche?

Emma has even questioned her relationship with social media through media interviews and episodes of her own podcast such as “is it narcissistic to post photos of yourself?” and “post it or it didn’t happen?”

The New Era of Engagement

As a member of Gen Z you may see your friends and select influencers posting photo dumps all the time, but up until recently this style of posting was far less common. In the past, we’ve seen a majority of influencers' content being very posed and well thought through. Think about Kylie Jenner or Alix Earle’s Instagram feeds. Each post is carefully curated to have only the most perfect shots from a recent photoshoot with the occasional pizza selfie to enhance their authenticity. Their posts are made to look conventionally flawless.

In recent years, Gen Z has become more aware that influencers like Kylie and Alix have extensive resources supporting their social media personas. Out of a place of near rebellion and spite for the things that most social media users do not have was born new, laid back engagement strategies, like what Emma uses. But Gen Z desires public authenticity even beyond the photo dumps and casual posing for posts. This demand has encouraged the creation of completely new platforms like BeReal to only allow users to engage with one another through more organic means. Although, even an app “pitched as Gen Z’s safe haven from the artifice of social media” is not immune from the struggle to keep engagement up.

Major social media strategy company, Sprout Social, says that “[social] media engagement can include likes, comments and shares, but varies by platform.” The goal is for influencers to get as much engagement as they can per post, so it makes sense that if a laissez-faire approach works for someone as popular as Emma Chamberlain other influencers would quickly catch on.

Going back to her first YouTube video in 2017, Emma has always presented herself as a relatable figure in the media. She took viewers along with her to her driving test for her license, San Francisco thrift hauls, and a vlog of her first day of junior year. As she grew in popularity, Emma took on new opportunities like creating content with her influencer friends in the Sister Squad and being on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine. She continued to grow her cult following and has now gone on to host one of the top performing lifestyle podcasts in the U.S., Anything Goes, and start her own coffee brand, Chamberlain Coffee. With a net worth estimated by Capitalism.com to be $12 million, Emma’s approach to social media has clearly paid off.

What’s Behind The Shifts

As Gen Z gets older and quickly becomes the dominating group of social media users, they inherently have more power over what’s considered cool and on trend. It is important to remember that social media platforms are businesses looking to make money, so the power that Gen Zers have in this instance comes from where they’re willing to spend their dollars. Forbes estimates that Gen Z holds an approximate $360 billion in disposable income and they’re ready to use their spending power. Especially with recent trends showing an increasing trust in Social Media Influencers over Traditional Celebrities the power to influence that creators, like Emma Chamberlain, hold is even further exacerbated.

With young people looking to influencers to, you guessed it, influence them, brands are working to make their place in influencers’ content appear as organic as possible. Furthermore, when major influencers like Emma Chamberlain (who is notably a member of Gen Z herself) declare that they want to “keep Instagram casual” it is only logical that many sponsoring brands abide by the same mentality.

Many young social media users may not even know the extent by which companies value their data. Even when users think they are making their feeds authentic to themselves they are actually playing into the data that brands want to capture. On a global scale, social media platforms are projected to earn up to $252 billion annually by 2026. This is done largely by platforms selling space for other companies to use in their advertising, but also in part by just selling users’ data. So, as nice as it is to wake up to a fresh, perfectly curated feed every morning, just know that even photo dumps have a price attached to them.

What The Experts Think

As you may have anticipated, studies often come up with differing conclusions on the impact of social media on its users. The Journal of Mental Health was even stumped to find a conclusion by the culmination of 70 studies conducted between 2005 and 2016 all focusing on the impact of social media on its users.

A more recent study by the McKinsey Health Institute has concluded more succinctly that “Gen Zers, on average, are more likely than other generations to cite negative feelings about social media.” But even with a conclusion as finite as this authors Erica Coe, Andrew Doy, Kana Enomoto, and Cheryl Healy acknowledge the fact that “correlation is not causation, and… data indicates that the relationship between social media use and mental health is complex.” So, social media engagement is coming up with inconclusive impacts on its avid users’ lives… and what are we to do?

Many of the strategies that doctors and other mental health experts propose for individuals struggling with their relationship to social media mirror advice given to people struggling with their overall balance with technology. MindWise Innovations, a company aimed at encouraging people to self-evaluate their quality of life, encourages specific habits like scheduling your time to use social media, declaring a purpose before engaging with social media (and sticking to it), and adopting a mindset of inspiration rather than comparison when looking at others’ posts.

Other sources put an emphasis on knowing how to keep yourself safe on social media, recognizing that reaching out for help can look like speaking to your doctor instead of looking only to strangers on the internet, and overall trying to live in the moment. These strategies, while proven to be helpful, can seem big and daunting to take on when you’re first trying to evaluate your relationship with social media. Instead, looking to smaller day-to-day check-in strategies like those listed by MindWise Innovations are likely to be less intimidating. Once you’re at a point where you feel you are ready to look at bigger picture solutions, then thinking of larger structural issues with society’s overall reliance on social media may be helpful.

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Katelyn Lewicky is a second-year undergraduate student at American University studying Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing and a minor in Graphic Design. She is passionate about uplifting small businesses and people in her community through social media marketing and blog writing.