Social media has become part of life nowadays, to some people it is as much as part of their everyday life as REAL life and it can be hard to sometimes differentiate the two. Social media has many great aspects, such as keeping in touch with friends and family, a source of motivation and encouragement, a place to learn and share interesting thoughts. But it also has various downsides that many people can find themselves getting sucked into without even knowing.

First a few things about some of the social media platforms that you may not know about:

Facebook:

• If you have a Facebook page and you keep wondering why nobody sees or likes your posts, it is because Facebook does not show a lot of the posts to many people. They want you to pay and promote your posts in order to show more people. With so many millions of pages on Facebook it is hard to show every post to all of your followers.
• You can see this where a Facebook page has maybe +- 50 000 likes (people following the page) and each of the posts has maybe a few hundred likes. The user engagement is very low on the posts.
• Where the user engagement on the posts is exceptionally low but the page has a very high number of followers (for example a page with 50 000 likes and maybe a few hundred or less likes per post), it is highly probably that the page bought most of their likes or followers.
• A Facebook page can be a great marketing tool, but it can prove to be very frustrating and difficult to get it out there if you are a small brand and you are hoping not to fork out much money on it. In order to get people to see your posts you are going to have to promote some posts.

Instagram:

• There are apps and programs that people use and pay for, to randomly like and comment on posts throughout Instagram to try and get their accounts noticed and to get more followers. That is why you sometimes see some random short comments like “Great pic ;)” from some random Instagram account that you have never seen before. Even some ‘famous’ people use these services and you may just see one of these celebrities liking one of your posts. So next time this happens don’t get overly excited that someone famous liked or commented on your picture, it may just be an automated like which they payed for.
• There are Instagram pages with well over say 2 million followers but each post has only say 1000 likes. Its quite likely that the page has bought the followers as with that kind of following the posts should receive a lot more engagement (roughly about +-15 000 likes for instance).

If you are into fitness you will undoubtedly know who Tavi Castro and Sandra Prikker are. If not, they were quite a famous fitness couple who ran an online training and gym clothing business in the Netherlands. They recently ended their relationship, the relationship though was shown all over social media throughout their time together.

Sandra made a video about the ‘truth about the break up’ that can be seen below, followed by an Instagram post by Tavi.

I saw the post , I didn’t see this coming and I’m saddened by the immaturity . Love & hate are not opposites, but the same obsession. I will not make a perfectly refined video with slides, perfect lighting, lies , and horrible twists on truths to hurt someone I loved just because it’s not going well for me. Good people don’t waste energy on pain and hurting others under any circumstance. Indeed karma is real, I have been used , neglected, also been cheated on, I put no one on the street, took no dog as hostage, and take responsibility for my actions and move on. Now I’m doing what I love with the people I love. Enjoying the simpler things in life . #forward

A photo posted by Tavi ™ (@tavicastro) on Mar 28, 2016 at 3:38am PDT

The thing with social media is that everyone only posts the good stuff, or makes sure that the posts are done up and edited to show them in a good light, even though they may be going through hell.

This is just one case out of a few that shows how ‘fake’ it can be. The relationship was over months ago, but for the sake of social media and for the ‘fans’ they still made sure to post pictures etc. to seem as though everything was going great and to keep the image up.

At the end of the day we can only speculate what happened since there is always two sides to the story, but their relationship is really none of my business or yours. The thing to take away from it is that while we may follow many of these people on social media, it is important not to feel down on our own lives thinking theirs is so magnificent just because we see pictures and snapshots of them smiling. We never know how ‘real’ it really is. It is also very easy for someone to create a different ‘persona’ online to what they may really be like in real life. So before you go off and worship and support some of the people you only see on social media, by buying all their merchandise and training programmes, take caution and try to see the real person behind the online persona.