Your Digital Footprint

By: Christina Ho, Intern

Instagram is used by five times as many people that did in 2013. However, people are posting fewer photos on Instagram according to The Information. Nevertheless, this worrisome trend doesn’t mean that Instagram’s overall popularity is slowing down. Instagram has grown from 90 million users in 2013 to to 500 million current users with 300 million active daily users, averaging 21 minutes each day on the app.
I am an avid user of Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat and have felt the trend taking place within the past two years. When I first created an Instagram account in 2013, I uploaded a picture of daily snippets in my life almost everyday. . Now, I only post once or twice a week. Instagram picked up this trend among its users and adopted tactics to encourage more direct activity. For example, there is a push notification whenever someone has “posted a photo for the first time in a while.”Could it be that we have slowly realized the importance of our digital footprint?
We are constantly online and it leaves us with a digital footprint that can trace down our activities. We sometimes overlook this and underestimate the influence it has on our lives, especially in the professional field. As we rely more on the web, it is important to understand the magnitude of our digital trail left behind by online shopping, social media and web-surfing as we easily switch from mobiles, tablets, and laptops. Additionally, there has been an increase in high profile controversial website attacks and hacks. Using “private mode” doesn’t indicate that your profile, activity and data will not be provided to a third party.
While minimizing activity on the web is smart for all these reasons, withdrawing your online presence could cease your existence in a world where individuals are increasingly judged on their number of followers, online engagement and social influence. For example, at Fusion PR, in order to find suitable media for our clients, we need to take into account these factors.
I think the one thing we can take away from all of this is to just be yourself online. We should treat technology as a tool to provide a wealth of opportunities as well as selflessly helping others along the way.