You’re on a street corner in New York when all of a sudden you see everyone around you check their phone notifications at once. They quickly raise their phones and simultaneously take a photo of their surroundings in unison.
No, it isn’t a flash mob-style Vidlet study, just the latest social media craze: BeReal.
Photo courtesy of Refinery29
The concept is simple enough - each day, all users will get the same notification at the same time, telling them that they have two minutes to post a photo. The resulting content is a real, uncurated look at your friend’s days.
While the resulting content is a bit more mundane than Instagram’s curated couples poses and filtered lattes, the sentiment of “real life” is a breath of fresh air for many users.
Does any of this sound familiar? If you’ve participated in a Vidlet study, you know that our concept of real people, real-time is the not-so-secret sauce to honest insights. With Vidlet’s video insights, we see people’s personal lives through a unique lens, one that cannot be shared in a conference-room focus group. We see stressors, joys, and moments of confusion. We’ve seen people’s life-saving medical devices, their anguished sighs as they attempt to open tricky packaging, and most importantly, we see how they really interact with your product or service in their own home. We see real people.
Screenshot from Vidlet app
We’re glad to see social media following the path of authenticity that we know works for human connection, rather than a perfectly curated focus group or a meticulously planned Instagram grid. While we don’t know what the future holds for BeReal (will they build an ad engine, or just sell?), we do know from experience that the trend toward real human interaction is here to stay.