Why do people present different versions of themselves on LinkedIn versus Instagram or TikTok?
People present different versions of themselves on different platforms because each one has a different audience, a different purpose and different unwritten rules. We all adjust how we behave depending on who is watching, and social media simply makes those adjustments more visible. Showing a polished professional self on LinkedIn and a more playful self on TikTok is not dishonest; it is normal human behaviour.
The sociologist Erving Goffman explained this in 1959 in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. He compared social life to a theatre, where we perform different roles “front stage” for different audiences and relax “backstage”. You behave differently in a job interview than at a family barbecue, and you are still the same person.
Social media complicates this. Alice Marwick and danah boyd described how social media “collapses” multiple audiences into a single context, making it harder to use the techniques we rely on to manage different audiences face to face. They noted that people write for an “imagined audience”, which may be quite different from the people who actually read their posts. Having separate platforms for separate purposes is one way people restore the boundaries that context collapse removes: LinkedIn for colleagues and clients, Instagram for friends and interests, TikTok for entertainment.
Each platform also rewards different behaviour. LinkedIn encourages achievements, expertise and professional language, sometimes to the point of jargon (see Are you being too cheugy if you constantly mention your wheelhouse? and Is corporate speak making you worse at work?). Instagram rewards attractive images and lifestyle. TikTok rewards humour, spontaneity, and trends. People naturally adapt to what gets a positive response.
These online selves are usually edited rather than invented. Research by Mitja Back and colleagues in 2010 found that people’s social media profiles largely reflected their actual personalities rather than idealised versions of themselves. The risk comes when the gap between the online and offline self becomes large, or when we forget that everyone else is editing too, which can fuel unhealthy comparison. (See the FAQs on digital wellbeing.)
What is the psychology behind why content goes viral?
Content goes viral when it makes people feel something strongly enough to act, and when sharing it makes them look good, helps others or connects them with people they care about. Emotion, usefulness, and social identity matter far more than luck, although luck and platform algorithms still play a big part.
The most influential research comes from Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman at the Wharton School, who analysed nearly 7,000 New York Times articles to see which made the “most emailed” list. They found that positive content was more likely to be shared than negative content, but that the relationship was more complicated than simply good versus bad. Sharing was partly driven by physiological arousal: content that triggered high-arousal emotions, whether positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety), spread more. Sadness made content less likely to be shared, and in their model, anger was the strongest single predictor of virality. That helps explain why outrage spreads so easily online.
Berger later summarised the drivers of sharing in his book Contagious using the acronym STEPPS: social currency (sharing makes us look good), triggers (everyday reminders), emotion, public visibility, practical value and stories. People share useful content to help others and interesting content to show what kind of person they are.
It is also worth being realistic. Very little content truly goes viral in the sense of spreading from person to person like a virus. Research by Sharad Goel and colleagues found that most widely shared content reaches large audiences through a few big broadcasts, such as a celebrity or a media outlet sharing it, rather than long chains of individuals. Much sharing also happens privately through messaging apps and email, so it is invisible to analytics, as I explain in Your website sharing statistics are fibbing.
For businesses, the lesson is not to chase virality but to create content that people find genuinely useful or emotionally engaging, with a headline that makes them want to look (see How to grab people with fantastically stunning titles). Attention-grabbing for its own sake can work, but it carries risks, as I discuss in Could you be the Bonnie Blue of your business?
What is parasocial interaction, and why do people feel a real friendship with influencers they have never met?
Parasocial interaction is the one-sided sense of connection people feel with media figures who do not know they exist. Influencers speak directly to the camera, share personal details and appear in our feeds every day, so our brains respond as if they were friends. The feelings are real, even though the relationship is not mutual.
The idea was introduced in 1956 by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, who described how radio and television created what they called “intimacy at a distance”. Presenters who spoke directly to viewers, using a conversational style, gave audiences the illusion of a face-to-face relationship. Over time, these repeated one-sided interactions can develop into parasocial relationships, where people feel they know a media figure personally.
Social media has intensified this. Influencers talk to “you”, share their homes, routines and struggles, reply to some comments and appear in our feeds daily. All of these are cues our brains associate with real friendship: frequency of contact, self-disclosure, apparent responsiveness and similarity. Because humans evolved before mass media existed, we are not naturally equipped to distinguish between someone we know and someone we simply see often. This is closely related to why people treat AI chatbots as human (see the FAQs on the psychology of artificial intelligence).
Parasocial relationships are not necessarily unhealthy. They can provide comfort, inspiration, a sense of company and a shared interest with other fans. But they also have commercial power. A review of research on social media found that the perceived intimacy of parasocial relationships can increase trust and loyalty towards influencers, along with people’s intention to buy what they recommend. That is why brands pay influencers rather than simply advertising.
This raises questions about transparency. When a “friend” recommends a product, people may not realise they are seeing an advertisement. In the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority and the Competition and Markets Authority publish an influencers’ guide requiring paid content to be clearly labelled. ASA research found that 80% of the UK online population prefer influencers to be clear when they are advertising, yet only about half of participants correctly identified the ads in a test social media feed.
How do online communities create a genuine sense of belonging for a brand?
Online communities create genuine belonging when they bring together people who share an interest, give members a real voice, develop shared language and traditions, and encourage people to help one another. The brand provides the focus, but the relationships between members are what make people feel they belong.
The idea of a “brand community” was introduced by Albert Muñiz and Thomas O’Guinn in 2001. They described it as a specialised community, not tied to a place, based on a structured set of social relationships among admirers of a brand. Studying communities around Ford Bronco, Macintosh and Saab, they identified three traditional markers of community: a shared consciousness, rituals and traditions, and a sense of moral responsibility. In practice, that means members feel connected to each other and different from outsiders, share practices such as greeting fellow users and celebrating the brand’s history, and feel a duty to help other members and welcome newcomers.
Psychologists David McMillan and David Chavis identified four elements of a sense of community in 1986: membership (feeling you belong), influence (feeling you matter and can make a difference), integration and fulfilment of needs (getting something valuable from being involved) and shared emotional connection (shared history and experiences). Successful brand communities provide all four.
This explains why many corporate “communities” fail. A brand page that simply broadcasts promotions offers none of these things. Genuine communities let members talk to each other, not just to the brand. They recognise and celebrate members, act on their ideas and allow some disagreement. The brand acts more like a host than a broadcaster. Valuable content, rather than advertising, is often what brings people together in the first place (see Improved brand loyalty comes from content, not advertising).
Businesses also need to choose where communities live. Public social media platforms can change their rules or algorithms overnight, and brands only see a narrow and sometimes biased view of their customers there (see Is there a hidden bias in social media that is harming your business?). Some brands are moving towards communities they host themselves, as I discuss in Is it time for your business to reconsider social media? Wherever a community lives, belonging is built through people, not platforms.