Types of People on Everyone’s Social Media Feed

For those active on social media, it forms such a huge part of who we are whether we like it or not, and whether we accept it or not. If you’re posting anything on social media you are aware that people will see it and react to it, so already subconsciously the social media pressure is on your mind when you post something. And no matter how much we try to avoid it, we do get typecast into a certain type of social media persona and here they are:

1. The influencers

We all have these people, the ‘swipe up’, ‘link in bio’, ‘use my discount code’ people. I have nothing against them, I have done all three of these things despite decidedly not being an influencer. I use ‘link in bio’ every time I post something on my blog, I used ‘use my discount code’ that one time I had a discount code for something and one time, just to mess with people, I used a ‘swipe up’ gif instead of the actual swipe up button (because I don’t have enough followers to get an actual swipe up button), and asked people to swipe up and they couldn’t and I got several DMs asking what the problem was. There was no problem, I just wanted to waste people’s time.

I don’t know about others but influencers have influenced me to do certain activities or buy certain products, which means they are good at what they do. I feel like they deserve a lot more respect than they get- people think their jobs are easy, just go to places and share stories, but in reality, it requires a lot of time and effort to stay consistent with influencing people.

2. The people who think they are influencers but are really not

I bet everyone has these people too. The kinds of people who start stories with ‘a lot of you have been asking me…’ and you go to their profiles and they have barely 500 followers and you are forced to wonder, ‘who is asking you this? Your cousins?’ They have descriptive stories about the products they use, the places they hang out at and the skin care routines they abide by. Hey, you do you, no judgement here, I’m just describing this type.

3. The Fitness Bloggers

Every post is a workout routine, or a motivational post about how to get to your strongest, or something about how they are human too and they make mistakes in food and drink, sometimes even pictures from a pool or a beach, showing off their bikini and aesthetics of the body wearing the bikini, or in case of men, just a shirtless photo. I like the ones who post actual meaningful content. When it’s a skinny-ass blogger talking about her struggle with fitting into clothes and feeling bloated, I do want to take my shoe off and throw it in the general direction of the basic bitch.

4. The Food Bloggers

Now, I don’t mind people who post photos of their food (‘#foodporn’ is a bit disturbing though), or take photos of their food, but the ones who make a big deal out of it, getting the attention of the group before they take said picture and stop everyone from eating- I kind of want to shoot them in their faces sometimes. Not because I’m really hungry, but because it doesn’t take a lot to piss me off sometimes. Although if you’re actually sharing recipes out of interest instead of stopping everyone from digging in, then you’re safe.

5. The Content Creators

Again, they deserve a lot more respect than they get because I’ll bet their haters can’t actually create any of the content on their own, the one that they binge on for hours. It takes a lot of creativity, time and effort to provide this content, no matter what it is- a video, piece of music, art, written word, whatever!

6. The Ones Who Only Ever Talk About Politics

Sometimes, these are the people you rely on to get your politics news. These people are extremely passionate about hating the incumbent leader (more often than not, rightly so), so they share memes of equal measure of hatred and hilarity.

7. The Motivational Quotes Person

I like to think of myself as a generally positive person (aside from when food bloggers piss me off). I don’t assume the worst in people, I believe that nobody is born as a douchebag or a bitch and that insecurities and circumstances have made them so, so as a human being it is my duty to offer them a chance to be the best version of themselves. If someone wrongs me, I no longer put their name on a list (alongside Dolores Umbridge and Lord Voldemort- I don’t really know what I was going to do with this list in the first place). But there is something to be said of the motivational quotes people on my feed because I’ve had to unfollow a bunch of them as their positivity was extremely inauthentic and at times cloying.

To counter the positivity from their accounts, I started my own series of less motivational quotes to provide some balance to my feed. Here are some of the things I said to dilute the positivity:

— ‘If you’re going to end things with your SO, make sure you do it in 2020. 2021 would have a fresh batch of disappointments anyway.’

— *whilst holding a mug that said ‘Make Today Wonderful’*

‘why, what’s so wonderful about today? It’s a regular Tuesday morning’.

— ‘if you are coming to my NYE party, please come with an attitude to pass out as we enter 2021 #startasyoumeantogoon

— *in conversation with a colleague*

Colleague: why are you getting grilled?

Me: Because my life is a failure and I’m incompetent

8. The Ones Who are Barely There

These ones only ever show up on three occasions- a) when they’re drinking, b) when their friends get married/there is a birthday in the group and they want to wish them well, and c) when they have a picture of a pretty sunset to share. For most of their existence on social media they act as observers rather than providers of content and they are happy to just watch as everything around them unfolds.

9. The Artsy Photographers

These are the ones who might have an art blog or be talented photographers- very much along the lines of content creators, and hence extremely talented!

10. People’s Pets

Hands down, my favourite type of accounts. I have one for my dog, too. Somebody tried to slide into his DMs, that was rather shocking.

11. Everybody’s Parents

Remember when everybody’s parents joined Facebook and now they are all crawling into Instagram and sometimes they comment on your stories, ‘this is not a nice outfit’ and then you wonder why you accepted their follow request? This didn’t happen to me *awkward silence*