When you have something you want to share, social media can be such a great tool. Who doesn’t love sharing a stream of instagram posts on an artsy museum trip or tweeting off their wittiest takes on a movie during a late-night binge. But, as with many things, there is a fine line between showing off and over-sharing. And crossing that line may cost you some online love.
As shown in a new survey from Insight Pest Solutions, which tracked different types of social media “pests”, over-the-top social media behaviors are among the most irritating for followers. The survey, which gathered opinions about different behaviors across different platforms had some interesting insights about which behaviors are much too much.
First, the study measured up which behaviors of “‘pests’ who are doing too much,” were the most annoying.
By far, the most annoying “doing too much” habit was obvious trolling, as voted on by 40% of survey respondents. On top of this, trolling can even be viewed as a form of cyberbullying and those who do “too much” may have to face legal consequences.
But it’s not just trolling that can irritate followers. Other habits also drew large rates of annoyance within the category of excessive social media excess.
People who use too many filters were the most annoying excessive users, according to around 17% of voters. Likewise, those who add too many hashtags to their captions are the most annoying to 13% of voters.
Finally, even posters attempting to add a little humor to personal feeds are considered annoying. Nearly 12% of voters considered those who posted too many memes or only posted in memes were the most annoying of surplus-posting pests.
After that, the survey looked more specifically into different channels of social media.
Excessive behaviors that were considered most annoying popped up differently across platforms.
Snapchat was a major avenue for over-posting pests. Annoying behaviors like posting too much and filters that were considered to be especially annoying in the “too much” category also made the top 5 most annoying Snapchat behaviors.
On Facebook, the excessive “over sharing” was the channels’ second most annoying behavior. Finally, specific to Twitter, superfluous trolling made the top 5 most annoying behaviors.
If there’s anything to be learned from the survey, it’s that less may be more in terms of social media. This may just be another signal for everyone to take time to put down their phones.