Question

Does the popularity and approval of an individual on his/her social media profile relate to overall self-confidence and sense of well-being?

Answer 1

Q: Does the popularity and approval of an individual on his/her social media profile relate to overall self-confidence and sense of well-being?

Answer:

The social media platforms were fundamentally developed to promote communication between remotely placed people. However, over the time the platforms have evolved to meet multi-dimensional wants of individuals which are socially connected. Referring to age old Maslow’s Need Hierarchy(1954), these group of people (representing significant part of overall population) who have fully or mostly fulfilled their basic needs, i.e. Physiological needs and Safety and security needs. The social media platforms provide them the opportunity to satisfy the upper need segment, i.e.,

• Belongingness and love needs (social needs)
• Esteem and ego needs (self-esteem, recognition, status)

Such needs are evaluated through the social media, which is perceived as self image by individuals. The psychological impact gets oriented around following questions which each individual user of social media, uses to ask himself/herself,

• What they think about me
• How they feel about me

The social media has unique feature to represent the aggregates of such thinking/feeling and to promote a sense of prestige, which could not be actually generated during normal socializing. Therefore, the feeling of appreciation for an individual handsome man or a pretty lady is different from that of many likes on his or her latest posted photo. The second case provides a collective sense rather than individual feedback, and most importantly the collective feedback is well recorded or documented and could be reached to much more numbers, which can never be reached physically. Thus hundreds of likes for a particular comment or photo is easily connected with sense of being proud about himself/herself – the reciprocity effect. This is a typical component of subconscious mind, whereby every individual have emotional need of prestige or self esteem, like being popular among the mass, which may be otherwise difficult for the individuals. However they fulfill such need of subconscious mind through the social media platforms and very often the benefit is ripped by social media marketers. They more and more promote the features which increase the overall self-confidence and sense of well-being among the users. One of its unique attribute is also that comparison between individual profiles is possible, for example: my close friend’s profile photo has these many likes, but my profile photo has even more likes. This gives a sense of win over the others. Again this is attributable to subconscious mind.

Creating online profile also provides scope to construct and refine own image, to project and individual differently (even far from reality) which cannot be done I real life. The sensation of self presentation is very strong and very often people could be obsessed with it. These way the popularity and approval of an individual on his/her social media profile relate to overall self-confidence and sense of well-being for maximum users.