Berta Carreras Garcia |
Barcelona (EFE).- Gossiping in a natural and spontaneous way has become easier since ‘BeReal’, a fashionable social network, widely used by young people in Spain, has tripled its users in just two years.
The operation of the application is simple: every day at an unforeseen time, it asks its users to share with their friends a photograph in less than two minutes of what they are doing at that very moment with the aim of letting all their followers know what they are doing. each user is busy at that instant.
The director of the ‘Social Media: Management and Strategy’ master’s degree at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), Silvia Martínez, explained to EFE that “BeReal is the mobile application of the year 2020 for iPhone and the favorite of Android users” .
“As the name indicates, the objective of the application is to be real, a concept that is booming and that contrasts with the idyllic and thoughtful images of other social networks. It is a very revolutionary mobile application, which avoids scenes made up and tries to show reality without filters or posturing”, added the professor.
‘BeReal’, 10 million daily active users
According to Online Optimism’s March 2023 figures, ‘BeReal’, an app developed by the French Alexis Barreyat and Kevin Perreau, has been installed 73.5 million times worldwide and has 10 million daily active users. In Spain, according to Comscore, last August there were already 287,000 users.
“Its speed of growth is very striking, but right now it is in a second phase and it is interesting to see its evolution to verify its real value”, Martínez commented.
For his part, the UOC’s Information and Communication Sciences professor, Ferran Lalueza, explained to EFE that “adolescents flee parental control and seek novelty, which would explain the success of this network social network”, but warns that the fact that it is new “could also be its weak point in case another social network is born”.
“BeReal is somewhere in the middle, it can consolidate among the big social networks or it can disappear like Facebook or Snapchat did, but it is still a trending app with intense connectivity and a high number of users that can lead it to success”, Lalueza has recognized.
According to a survey of 900 ‘BeReal’ users, 88% of users open the application every day and, of these, 77% do a ‘BeReal’ every day, but even so, according to Martínez, it is crucial for the evolution of the application that “updates more functionalities to generate new users, new content and to increase the connection time”.
Lalueza has clarified that “BeReal is committed to maintaining its essence, but in the future they will have to turn around to extract commercial benefits, it could become monetized and I do not rule out the creation of new influencers, although then it would lose part of its essence in the relations between linear users and from you to you”.
“It could also include brand promotion, premium services and marketing with user images, since they have the right to share them for 30 years,” Lalueza specified.
useful for travel
Mariona López, a 22-year-old Psychology student at the Ramon LLull University, is a regular user of ‘BeReal’ and is new to the world of Instagram influencers, and has told EFE that “BeReal is an interesting tool to use as a travel content creator, to show the day to day in an improvised way and a different face from the one I show on Instagram”.
“Although one of the drawbacks of BeReal is that it limits the number of people you can reach and the number of posts and comments on Instagram,” the user countered.
Sara, a 21-year-old student of Journalism at Pompeu Fabra University, also uses ‘BeReal’ every week and believes that it is “very interesting to only have two minutes to take a photo and not wonder if you’re doing well or not and not enter the game of what other social networks do”.
“Since they don’t have advertising, it seems difficult for it to be maintained, and, despite its current success, because it is an alternative to Instagram, it may end up disappearing when not being perfect is normalized,” the student concluded.