Some people are born social media superstars, and some people are born average as far as their cyber popularity goes. Me, I’m one of the painfully average. The former are experts at promoting themselves on social media sites. These Facebook phenoms have thousands of friends, hundreds of likes on their profile pictures, and look flawless in every tagged pic they are in. They are the Rembrandts of their craft, invincible and perfect in the eye of the Facebook stalker. Me? Well, I just found a Reese’s Piece in my bra, so can make your own assumptions about the rest of my life.
Although I don’t really care about the number of friends or followers I have on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter, there is one social media maven whose realms of popularity I cannot even fathom how to penetrate. No matter how hard I try to be really good at Instagram, I am really REALLY bad at it. I am starting to think it hates me. First of all, I was über late getting on the Instagram train. I was convinced it would be a passing craze, that its popularity would diminish by the time I was prepared to enter its world of filters and hashtags. I brushed off my friends who had Instagram accounts as self-centered food addicts. All they did was take pictures of their meals at dinner; tell me that doesn’t sound at least a little dumb. Second of all, I just didn’t understand the concept of Instagramming things and then linking them to other social media sites. It all sounded like some sort of weird world technology domination conspiracy that only Oprah or Mark Zuckerberg could be behind. And something about them both rubs me the wrong way.
Once I realized that Instagram was in it for the long haul, however, I decided to give it a whirl. My whirl turned out to be more like a vague pirouette, after which I fell over and hit my head super hard on the concrete. How do people get so many likes on their pictures?, unpopular me wonders daily as I refresh my feed every fifteen seconds while simultaneously successfully completing the BC look away. All I want is for the little number below the picture to be a series of digits and not a list of Instagram handles; it took me a grand total of like two milliseconds to figure out that in order for this to happen, you need to get eleven likes on your photo.
I, like, never get 11 likes. Other kids I follow get hundreds. WTF.
So, now my Instagram inferiority complex is in full swing. I sound conceited, egocentric, and obsessed with parts of life that are absent from any sort of grounded reality. Whatever. I just want people to like my darn pictures.
Being average really stinks, especially when you can see how well everyone else is doing in this undocumented, unacknowledged popularity contest wherein I very well may be the only participant. I’ve tried many tactics, everything from selfies to pictures of puppies to my Starbucks latte to abstract snapshots of clothes at one of my favorite Boston boutiques. None of these has garnered half the likes or comments that my friends get. Don’t worry, though; I’m not bitter.
I guess maybe I should just give up, as Instagram obviously isn’t for me and I’m much more successful at Pinterest. My ‘Gram unpopularity just makes my life feel lackluster and boring. C’est la vie, I guess. Just please, people, stop using Vine. I can’t even begin with that one.
Photo Sources:
http://www.siliconrepublic.com/fs/img/news/201212/rs-426×288/instagram.jpg
http://www.cypressnorth.com/wp…