Introduction
If you are unaware of what BeReal is, it is a fairly new social media that has, unlike other social media app, been able to legitimately break into the main social media space (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). The premise of the app is at a random time during the day, a notification will be sent to all users, and users have 2 minutes to take a picture with their front and rear camera to share with their friends. If they don’t post within the 2 minutes, a user is allowed to post late. Additionally, a user cannot see their friends posts without posting first. The goal is to share a random moment in your day with the rest of your friends. For many reasons, this is a very innovative and pure form of social media in my opinion; however, there are a couple flaws that if they don’t fix, could cause their demise.
Pros
There are many parts of BeReal that make it a very innovative as a social media app. First, while other social medias offer the illusion of keeping in touch with friends across the country/world, BeReal, in my opinion, actually allows you to keep in touch with your friends. Because of the nature of the app, people are inclined to only add their closest friends, rather than an app like Instagram and Twitter, where people are inclined to follow anyone even somewhat socially adjacent to them. Additionally, because everyone posts once a day, with little to no effort, friends are able to feel more of a sense of staying in touch than an app like Instagram.
Additionally, the fact that users won’t add as many other users, and only one post is allowed per day, it becomes hard for a user to get addicted. You are limited to the amount of posts you see per day, so you spend an ample amount of time on the app without the potential of getting addicted.
Lastly, and I think the most important, is the fact that it is almost impossible for the app to be taken over by corporations like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat are. Corporations rely on user retention, which leads them to need to put out a large volume of posts. This leads users’ feeds to be flooded more by corporate and sponsored posts rather than their friends. However, because users only post once a day on BeReal, corporations would have a much harder time attempting to reach users. Additionally, an explore page on BeReal is not a feature that works. There is already a discovery page, however, it almost never gets used. This provides the most pure social media experience, where you only see posts from your friends in chronological order, without being stopped by random sponsored posts.
For these reasons, BeReal provides a pure social media experiences, where you are seeing exactly what you expect on your feed.
The Cons
While there are a great amount of pros for BeReal, there are a couple foundational aspects of the app that may lead to the demise of the app.
First, the backend software behind the app cannot handle the huge spikes in traffic it receives when it sends out the BeReal notification. During these 2 minutes, there will always be a huge spike in traffic, as everyone attempts to capture their BeReals. This leads to a significant amount of problems users experience as they try to capture their BeReals. Bugs include users not able to capture their BeReals in the first place, the app deleting a user’s BeReal which causes users to have to repost their BeReal, and reactions disappearing, etc. These issues could pile up and eventually leading to users getting tired of the app and leaving it.
Additionally, users can start feeling fatigued simply doing the daily post. It can become monotonous to users, which will cause people to become bored of the app. Relatively soon, BeReal will need to add features to the app that will be new and exciting enough for users to stay.
Conclusion
BeReal is an innovative social media app that can really change the social media landscape, however, if they do not implement new features and strengthen their software infrastructure, they could easily fumble one of the biggest bags ever.