How can you tell if someone is faking it on social media?

We’ve all admired people on social media. You look at their glossy images, their very motivating quotes and captions and think “wow I want to be like them”. But over time I have come to realize that more people are fake on social media than you would actually believe. Living it up for the gram is very popular and especially in our generation where people would rather die than post anything that’s real. You need to remember that people will always give you the edited parts of their life and never their reality.

If you are unsure whether someone online is real, ignore the curated version and follow these five tips:

1. Follow their story

There are people on social media who flaunt their success but never really tell you where they came from and how they gathered all this so called wealth. Most people on social media are hell bent in sharing their best pictures with the best captions but no one really gives you valuable tips unless they actually have a real story to tell. The questions you should be asking are where have they come from? How did they get so successful? Where did they start and what was their journey? Ideally they should be sharing this online as they will have nothing to hide.

2. Look for proof

By this we mean look at their engagement rate, if the brand or person you’re following is influential then it will most certainly show. Some people have over 100k followers but really low engagement, when you look for evidence, testimonials, reviews, recommendations and referrals from others what are you likely to find. The number of followers they have and what people say about the brand or person will tell you a lot.

3. Lurk online

You need to do your own amount of snooping especially if it’s someone who is trying to sell themselves as a certain brand type. Once you start monitoring their content make sure you listen to interviews, articles reading comments from others as well as the social media posts to see if it marries up with all they are saying.

4. Do they share the highs and lows of their life?

Any quality kind of person on social media who is not just doing it for the gram has a way of sharing their highs and lows without necessarily sharing too much. Start monitoring more that their instastories but look out for the whole story. If they can share the lows and highs of their success and business, they are showing the full 360 picture.

5. What kind of people follow them? 

When you try and reach out how do they interact with you? As shady as this may sound, checkout their grammar and see if they are also willing to respond and also interact with you on a person level. If it’s a business does someone get back to you if you email? If they do a live video, do they take the time to say hello? Is there a way you can ask questions and talk to them first? We all need reassurance that a person or brand is real and so there should be a good customer service in place.

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