Let’s take a deep dive into everyone’s new obsession of Being real, following the booming success of the app earlier this year.
BeReal is a social media platform that notifies its users at a random point throughout the day, giving users 2 minutes to take a photo simultaneously through the front and back camera. It effectively shows a ‘realistic’ view of whatever they are doing at that exact time.
Users follow their friends, meaning everyday they can see where and what their friends are doing. If a user is late to post by more than the two minutes given when the notification goes off, the timestamp says exactly how late they were to post and therefore people can see when others aren’t ‘being real’.
So why is it so popular? Something that sets BeReal apart from other social media sites is it’s ‘RealMojis.’ These allow people to react to other people’s posts with their own facial expressions, taken in that moment.
Unlike Facebook and Instagram where reactions are purely emojis or gifs, this new app allows people to ‘be real’ with their reactions as well as their posts. Like Snapchat, BeReal keeps streaks of your posts, which is also popular among users, just as snapstreaks were a few years ago.
The app also keeps track of previous posts, keeping memories of every BeReal that you take so that you have the option to look back and see what you were doing each day of each month. However, you can’t look at your friends and followers’ previous posts, each one is only to be looked back on by the user. Like Snapchat, BeReal keeps streaks of your posts, this is also popular among users.
Some users try and cheat the system, and ‘BeFake’, posting much after the BeReal notification chimes, wanting to be seen doing something exciting when it goes off instead of laying in bed. Unfortunate for some, the timing of the notification is a mystery everyday and so we have to take our chances.
It could be argued that BeReal is taking over other apps with platforms such as Instagram having BeReal pages where the funniest or most unfortunate BeReals are reposted for others to see. If you follow any of these pages you will find BeReals of people standing next to their crashed car, dropped plates of food, in a snowstorm and so much more!
BeReal’s placing on Apple’s App Store social networking top charts just proves how popular this app has become. As of Saturday, 5th of November, BeReal was in second place, bested only by ‘HiPal – Walkie Talkie’ but topping other significant social media platforms like WhatsApp (4th place), Facebook and messenger (7th and 8th place respectively) and Discord (9th place). BeReal downloads are still on the rise, hitting 53.2 million downloads in September 2022.
So overall, BeReal is the new Snapchat, the new Instagram and the new Facebook all combined into one. Its popularity continues to rise daily, showing the community desire for more people to be real on social media.
Article by Maisie Otterburn and Emilie Jarrett
