Time to think twice about posting that selfie online?
There are two types of people in the world, the ones who share everything online, and the ones who don’t. However, social media is just a glimpse of a person’s life, a snapshot of the good, it’s never a complete picture.
Here at Shotkit, we wanted to delve further into this and look at a correlation between sharing posts or images of your relationship online, coined ‘couples content’, with how happy people ranked their relationships.
For our research we surveyed more than 2,000 Brits who were in a relationship, aged 18 - 50, and asked them to rank their relationship in regards to intimacy, communication and trust, as well as how much ‘couple content’ they share online.
We found that over half (52%) of people regularly post pictures of their relationship online (3+ times a week), followed closely by under a quarter, 24% of couples who share occasionally, on anniversaries etc. Perhaps unsurprisingly, only 8% of couples never share ‘couples content’.
However, it seems the older Millennials are posting much more than the younger Gen Z’ers, with 40% of Gen Z’ers regularly posting, and 64% of Millenials regularly sharing. Perhaps suggesting there is a happiness gap between healthy relationships across Millennials and Gen Z’ers.
When individuals were asked how they would rank their relationship, on average, just 10% of those who posted couples content would rank their relationship as ‘very happy’, in contrast to nearly half (46%) of those who never share their content online.
Below are some key findings of our research:
Level of relationship happiness of people who regularly share (3+ pieces of content a week) couples content online:
- Very Happy - 10%
- Happy - 22%
- Unhappy - 26%
- Very Unhappy - 42%
Level of relationship happiness of people who share couples content a once a week
- Very Happy - 32%
- Happy - 28%
- Unhappy - 25%
- Very Unhappy - 15%
Level of relationship happiness of people who share couples content a few times a year (Birthdays, anniversaries etc)
- Very Happy - 32%
- Happy - 33%
- Unhappy - 23%
- Very Unhappy - 12%
Level of relationship happiness of people who never share couples content online:
- Very Happy - 46%
- Happy - 27%
- Unhappy - 14%
- Very Unhappy - 13%
Out of those surveyed who never, or rarely post couples content on social media shared their reasoning why. The top three reasons were: “privacy”, “embarrassment” and “not regular social media users”. The results also revealed that same sex couples were most likely to share couples content to express ‘proudness’, whereas straight couples were more likely share to express that themselves or their partner were ‘taken’.
Lastly, we asked where people were sharing their ‘couples content’ the most. Facebook came in first place (73%), followed by Instagram (65%) and TikTok (44%). So, although TikTok is seemingly the most popular social media platform at the moment, perhaps not for our couples!
Mark Condon of Shotkit said,
“We wanted to carry out this research as there are often mixed views on whether posting on social media regularly has positive effects on us or not. We in particular wanted to look at the correlation between this and people in relationships. We expected there to be some disparities with the survey, but we didn’t know quite how much of a difference it could make in relationships.
“However, this isn’t to say that all selfies are bad, of course not. Perhaps the saying ‘too much of a good thing’ is true in this case. We hope that the research provided some insight, and perhaps food for thought for some people.”