Why Your Brand Shouldn’t BeReal
The inception of a new social media platform always broaches the question for marketers and advertisers: How can my brand get on this? In the case of BeReal, your brand should not because, by design, BeReal is not for brands.
For those who are unfamiliar, here is how it works: every day, users of BeReal receive a notification saying 'time to be real.' Then, users take out their phone within a two-minute posting window immediately following the notification to take a snapshot. The app uses the phone’s front and back camera to upload two images. BeReal is meant to be a 'more authentic' peek behind the curtain of people’s lives; removing filters and the ability to stage a photo beyond a few seconds of shuffling.
Your brand doesn’t belong on BeReal because BeReal is about unplanned authenticity, designed to make people feel more in the loop with their close friends. By nature, brands seeking to market their products on the platform are doomed to fail because it wasn’t built to turn its users into consumers. It’s not our problem to solve as marketers, it’s more so just another app we should all stay away from for many different reasons. Namely here’s three of them:
1. BeReal is boring
Where the app succeeds in being authentic, it doesn’t mean it makes for particularly interesting or provocative content, nor does it make people stick around - TechCrunch reports that only around 9% of Android users open the app daily. In his piece titled “BeReal Isn’t Real and Makes Everyone Look Extremely Boring,” Vice reporter Jason Koebler says, “If Instagram has the problem of making people’s lives look artificially glamorous, BeReal has the problem of making people’s lives look extremely (EXTREMELY) boring.”
As it turns out, when you take away people’s ability to curate what others see of their lives, most of their day is just… daily life. Brands should not seek to become more white noise in a barrage of monotonous, un-scintillating content. Social media is an opportunity to remind consumers why they should choose you, and there’s no choosing to be had when your presence on the app is meant to be boring by default.
2. Choosing to opt out of joining every platforms is an indicator of social media literacy
Being literate in the world of social media does not mean that every app can and should be joined. In fact, abstaining from utilising the latest app can be a sign that a brand is more savvy than not.
BeReal was developed as the antithesis of standard social media, some of which comes from the lack of opportunity for monetisation on the platform. Brands interjecting themselves into that conversation are showing that they don’t care about the intentions behind the platform, just that their brand is involved. In October 2022, Chipotle included a BeReal component to their long-running Boorito sweepstakes: Consumers who posted their BeReal in a Chipotle location in costume and with the #booritosweepstakes hashtag were entered to win one of 'Ten Free Burritos for a Year' prizes. While the brand is typically very social savvy, this activation demonstrated a lack of understanding, or a disregard, for how BeReal is meant to operate: encouraging posting outside of the time window and using hashtags within the platform. In other words, it encouraged users not to 'be real.'
3. BeReal was founded on FOMO, not a desire to connect
Good marketing is about connection. BeReal gets away with being so boring because it is not about the actual content. I didn’t download BeReal for the aesthetics or the daily notification or the thrill of the two minute posting window, I downloaded BeReal because everyone else did and I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t missing anything.
This same phenomenon is what makes marketers feel like they should join an app that makes no sense for brands to be involved in. It’s tempting to want to put your brand on the platform because other brands are doing it but brands shouldn’t intentionally interject themselves into a conversation that they will be immediately cast out of.
In summation, as more and more social platforms continue to pop up, deciding how and where your brand should show up will become an increasingly challenging conversation that we do not need to complicate further. They will inevitably crop up as time passes, but for now, suffice it to say that BeReal is meant to connect people to other people via the monotony of their everyday lives. The unavoidable, bottom-line truth here we can no longer deny is this: brands are not people.
