⚠️ BeReal ⚠️: Will it Stay Relevant?
Part One: Relevance score, proof of attendance, and feelings of isolation or comfort?
BeReal is #1 on the App Store.
BeReal 101: a social media app where users get a notification at a random time in the day and have 2 minutes to post a two-way pic, with any late photos marked as late. After posting, users can scroll through to see the uploads of close friends. The next day, the photos are gone, a new notification comes, and the cycle repeats.
The promise of the app is in its authenticity. The company says about the app that it is “a candid and fun place for people to share their lives with friends”, and “We want to make people feel good about themselves and their lives. We want an alternative to addictive social networks fueling social comparison and portraying life with the goal of amassing influence.”
There are articles coming out nearly every hour on BeReal. It’s hot - but just how hot is it with Gen Z?
How popular is BeReal right now?
Searches and mentions of BeReal are currently at their peak (for now) on Google and Snapchat.
The question everyone is asking is will it stay relevant? Or join the social media graveyard with Poparrazi and Clubhouse?
In order to understand where it is going, we must understand where it actually is today; BeReal’s cultural relevance.
Cultural relevance typically does not have a measurement - tools like Brandwatch report on metrics that can be reasonably informative, but cultural relevance is more than a combination of social mentions and views. Cultural relevance, in our definition, is the ability of a brand, person, or idea to consistently and organically stimulate conversation on and offline.
What is most important to cultural relevance is not the sharpness or magnitude of a rise, but how well that topic can persist over time in driving conversation. Brands can have a moment of relevance, like the trend for Adult Swim that took over TikTok more than a year ago, or they can persist in driving conversation over time.
At dcdx, we measure and quantify cultural relevance on a 0-100 scale that we call the GenZ Score®. We analyze the most popular, brand-relevant user-generated content on social over different time intervals to understand what factors drive brand conversation among a young audience, how often those factors emerge, and how much conversation is actually happening. The result is then standardized on a 0-100 scale, enabling us to compare any brand in the US on the same metric.
Within just the last week, BeReal has gone from a GenZ Score® of 77.1 to 80.8 (+3.7).
The popularity of UGC for BeReal just within the last week is up 124%.
We see that slowly, BeReal is persisting over time in driving organic conversations. Compare last week’s score to this week’s, and you’ll see that a +3.7 point jump in a week is massive. The score is built around persistence - taking into account relevance over multiple time frames - and yet still, overall cultural relevance is rising quickly.
The question we are all asking is - will it stay relevant?
We need to look at 3 forces to understand its trajectory.
What behaviors does it reveal about Gen Z today?
What behaviors is it creating/impacting?
Will this technology be able to adapt and evolve with culture?
What behaviors does it reveal about Gen Z?
Aside from spurring what appears to be an endless source of high-quality memes, BeReal reveals fascinating insights into Gen Z behaviors.
Proof of attendance (no, not like the NFT…unless?)
The biggest observable pattern for Gen Z in communications around BeReal is that there is a meme-like but very real intention to “win” BeReal.
In the moments in life we want to show others what we’re doing, we desperately want our BeReal notification to come.
But for the majority of us, it never comes when we want it to, inspiring content around what is likely the most popular and relatable element of BeReal: it never comes in clutch with the timing.
But why not just post those moments on Instagram?
But for those moments missed, why not just post on Instagram? Is that not what the platform is for? It is, yes. But here’s the key.
Because of the way the app works, an on-time post is proof. Time stamped proof that this is what you are doing, right now. On Instagram, that photo could be from whenever, doctored and edited however, and taken by whomever.
BeReal is a source of truth - at its core, it is actually not too disimilar to an NFT. If you post late, people know it’s late. If you post on time, peole know it’s on time.
You were either there at the time, or you were not. There is no questioning what you see or how you’re seeing it. Because you know who is taking the photo (thanks to the front and back cam photos).
It does indeed remove all of the fakeness of Instagram and Snap - photos that can be taken at any time, made to look any way, from any person.
BeReal does not lie. It is, well, real.
In those boring moments captured, does it make us feel even lonelier? Is it any better than Instagram or Snap?
While the majority of content on social may be about BeReal wins or BeReal fails, the majority of BeReal content is really just…boring. But that does not mean it is bad.
Casey Newton, former editor of The Verge and founder of Platformer writes in his article on BeReal:
I think all of this undersells just how weird BeReal can be. Your individual experience may vary — I’ve been out of college a long time, and most of my friends on BeReal seem never to leave their houses — but I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a mundane collection of media in my entire life as I have while browsing BeReal.
Here is a friend typing on a laptop. Here is a friend feeding his dog. Here is a friend staring at a wall of faces on Zoom.
Yet in a May piece, the New Yorker argues that despite the intentions of the app, it is not actually doing that much different than Instagram or Snapchat. They write:
“On many days since signing up for BeReal, I’ve been taking a nap or lying on the couch, staring at my phone, when the alert arrived. In most cases, I’ve either hurried to find something less embarrassing that I could plausibly be doing or simply skipped posting that day, thus missing out on the experience of Being Real entirely. Users may not be able to whiten their teeth or adjust the saturation in their posts, but they can still stage their pictures against their apartments’ nicest wall, or push piles of dirty laundry out of view.
The difference between BeReal and the social-media giants isn’t the former’s relationship to truth but the size and scale of its deceptions.”
Yes there are moments that win - the Harry Styles concert, the Louvre, etc. And there are certainly moments that lose, like a BeReal notification coming during the cremation of your sister 💀.
But what’s fascinating about this is that at the time of seeing it in the app, Gen Z knows it is just a moment. We know had it been two hours earlier or later, the moment would not have been captured.
While it may be true the size and scale of the deception differ, what is also true is that Gen Z’ers continue to post and engage, despite these “boring” moments, however small the deception around them may be.
And we believe that is because at the core, BeReal unlocks this untapped generational need for belonging and comfort through social. We believe it is comforting to see that your close friends have a life that is just as…boring….as yours.
That’s the end of part one. Next time, we cover:
2. What behaviors is it creating and impacting?
3. Will this technology be able to adapt and evolve with culture?
Until next time, ⚠️ BeReal ⚠️ my friends.
A final thought:
