In age where every college intern already has a personal brand, it’s hard to know when our social media use has gotten out of hand. Are we building or empire — or just annoying everyone around us? Fortunately, a new site offers a way to figure out if you’re That Person on social media.
(Photo Credit: Matt from London/Flickr)
SocialEffortScale.com greets you with a pop-up, inviting you to enter your birth year and click to accept terms. (It also subtly indicates that you’re dealing with some funny, creative folks — always inspiring, if you’re looking for advice on creating, essentially, viral micro-content.)
The site then lets you log in using Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram and ranks you as trying too hard, effortless, and not trying hard enough. The goal is to be in that middle category, where you’re doing just enough, without taxing people’s attention and interest.
SocialEffortScale.com evaluates accounts based on things like frequency of posts/status updates/shares, photos added and tagged, friends added, hashtags, retweets, and mentions, and so on, depending on which social network you’re looking at. The site then makes recommendations about how to reduce or raise your engagement to hit the sweet spot of effortless social media use.
The rest of the site offers data on trending hashtags, a video about social over-exertion, and a map that lets you compare your city’s social media use to other cities across the U.S.
The secret heart of the site, however, might be the fun facts page, which shines a light on the benign narcissism that fuels many of our social media mistakes. For example, now you know that someone uses the hashtag #selfie once every four minutes, on average. Not exactly the kind of tweet that gets a hiring manager’s attention.
It’s pretty clear that we all need this site’s help.
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Which social media behavior drives you crazy? We want to hear from you! Leave a comment or join the discussion on Twitter.
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