Personal Experience with Social Media Platforms
As of 2024 62.3% of the world’s population spends a daily average of two hours and twenty-three minutes on social media (Chaffey 2024). I am aware that I personally spend this amount of time or more on social media per day. I use Facebook for professional use and Instagram and TikTok for personal use. Although I use many other forms of social media, I believe these are the three I am most active on.
I use Facebook for both personal and professional use, although mostly professionally. I run the Choice Media Facebook account which is the account of the business I work for. On an average work day, I have Facebook open from 7:30 am to 5:00 pm. Even though I am still completing or assignments given to me I am still jumping back and forth between Facebook and my other tasks. I spend my time creating posts, interacting with other company pages, and keeping the company page up to date.
I use Instagram for strictly personal use. It helps me keep in touch with friends I don’t get to see all of the time. I all enjoy posting the exciting events in my life for my friends to see. I use the direct messaging system to spend important or funny posts to my friends and family. I enjoy scrolling on the for-you page to keep up to date on current fashion, TV shows that I watch, posts about Jesus, and all the other things I’m interested in.
The social media platform that I believe I use the most is TikTok. I spend most of my free time aimlessly scrolling TikTok. I post fun videos about my life and repost videos I relate to. My favorite thing about the TikTok app is ability to send TikTok’s to my friends. My friends and I send funny TikTok’s back and forth all day.
Social media impacts my life daily, both personally and professionally in positive and negative ways. It has helped me to grow professionally by helping others find the business I work for, which has intern gotten has more customers. Although, social media has also taken over a lot of parts of my life. I spend a good amount of time using social media to procrastinate getting important things such as school work and regular life activities.
Interactions with Social Media Influencers
Compared to 26% of the general population, 44% of Gen Zer’s have made a purchase based on a suggestion from a social media influencer (Sutarwala 2024). Social media influencers have a lot of control over the masses in today’s society. All of the popular forms of social media have influencers that are targeting specific demographics on all different types of products. Many people are easily convinced by social media influencers to buy a product said influencers are getting paid to promote.
I personally follow a few country/western lifestyle influencers, as well as western fashion influencers. Until this summer I was never convinced to buy a product just because an influencer on social media says I should and then TikTok Shop changed that. I have been influenced to buy a couple of products from TikTok Shop because the influencers that I follow are promoting said products very well. Although I don’t partake in buying influenced products often, the ones I have purchased have ended up being worth. I haven’t disliked or regretted purchasing the products so far due to the amount research I do before buying. I am not confident in products that influencers are being paid to promote so I do a large amount of research about them or reach out to friends or family that have recently bought them.
