Spontaneous. Uncontrived. Authentic? BeReal!

Now BeReal is stepping up and wants to do all this much better, offering new qualities: Here, reality is to be shown “for real,” as it “really” is. Really? BeReal wants to be THE new SM app: The target audience, Gen Z, is supposed to hang out here every day, showing what they are doing at a given moment, without preparation or staging, but directly, immediately, and thus: “in real life”! As a user, you receive a message: “You have two minutes. Post what you are doing right now!” You don't know when the prompt will come, where you will be, or what you will be doing. You don't have time to edit afterwards. Ergo: This could be more “real” than your other social media posts, which you spend several days preparing and editing.

BeReal also needs reach

Like everything else, this app cannot be sustained by good will alone; it also needs money for technology, operations, investors, and whatever else comes up. That can only be achieved through reach. And to get that, users are encouraged to pull funny faces so that the pictures = the BeReals are funny, comment on each other's pictures with funny faces, in other words, do everything they can to make it look spontaneous, unstaged, and therefore “authentic,” which is a contradiction in terms. But always funny and hopefully young, just short of tipping over into complete infantilism.

UX – there's still room for improvement...

… and that can also be a problem for an app like this. Where am I and how do I get more audience for my little self-promotional pieces? BeReal's usability is not yet simple and self-explanatory enough for that.

The calendar function is nice. If you're diligent and post your daily BeReal, you get a nice overview of what you've been up to in your social media-mirrored life: Where was I and what faces did my friends and I pull?

Who's participating in BeReal

The usual suspects are out and about, e.g.:

• Those who can afford it: ZDF, Germany’s public broadcaster, is also fulfilling its public service mission — for example, during the Olympics in Paris with daily clips and commentary from the on-duty young reporter.
• The prolific posters who are also good at it: The professional posers and soccer players of Paris Saint Germain. With only a few hours of training a day, they have plenty of time for new gimmicks and love to entertain their fans anyway. They can easily pull funny faces on the spot.
• Those who are young, find it funny, and are finally looking for something real: my teenage and adult daughters, their friends, and their entire community.

Others, such as older people, are (once again) super skeptical: “Who needs that?” and “Don't we already have way too many social media apps?”. No, we still don't.

BeReal - the rising Star

There are more and more social media apps. Why? Because they can be used to make money. Because young people are looking for their own niches, building them up and inventing new channels where only they can communicate at first. These offer them new and better advantages that the old offerings lack, and because the old ones are simply stupid or will soon become so, at least for them. And because that's just how it works with all media: they emerge, rise, slowly fade away or crash quickly. This app has achieved quite a bit since its launch in 2020:

• BeReal claims to have 40 million active users in Europe, the US, and Japan,
• 70% of whom are 18 to 27 years old,
• with a high activity rate, namely 70% of users who post daily,
• and 60% who also post something every day when they receive a notification. That's not bad!

Yes, BeReal really is fun!  Because of the notification—you never know when it will come, only that it hits you and everyone else at the same time—there’s an element of surprise, shared experience, and conversation: “So, what were you doing just now?” And we all look ridiculous, because the distorted facial expressions actually are pretty funny.

Whether BeReal can stand up to the harshness of real life—of adulthood, with all its messiness—when things get truly serious and genuinely “real,” remains to be seen. So far, there are no proven formats here for conveying serious messages. But if everything is supposed to stay cheerful and colorful, then BeReal is a perfect fit.

Don’t expect any intellectual depth here—at least not yet. It’s mainly visual. Not even the reporter from ZDF, Germany’s national public broadcaster, manages to squeeze a few meaningful words into her BeReals. But that’s kind of the point: it’s meant to be spontaneous, created in the exact moment. And honestly—what big thoughts can you really express in two minutes?

Even BeReal won’t be able to live up to its own claim of authenticity for much longer, especially thanks to the unspoken rule to always pull a funny face. If anything, that just raises the bar for the BeReal “posers”: you’ve got to be fast and polished. It’s a lot like improv theater—and the self-staging techniques it demands are spreading fast among a highly adaptive, quick-learning user base.

Oh, and legally? It’s a mess. Everyone’s posing, snapping, and posting anyone and anything, everywhere. With little concern for image rights, the people shown, locations, objects—nothing. But haven’t we all gotten used to that by now? Does anyone even care anymore? Well—they should.