MIT on BeReal

August 19, 2024

During the 2023-24 academic year, MIT often found itself in national and even international news. There was constant media coverage of on-campus protests and unrest, putting a spotlight on just one aspect of what was happening on campus and overshadowing all the other amazing discoveries, research, innovation, and life happening at the Institute.

We wanted to give our audiences an authentic and unfiltered window to MIT, showing the more usual and day-to-day activities on campus, and BeReal presented a solid option. BeReal is a social media app where once a day, at a random time, the app sends out a notification to all users, prompting them to take a photo within a two-minute window. This photo is captured simultaneously using both the front and back cameras of the phone, showing what the user is doing at that exact moment. Right now, the location tagging doesn’t mention your exact location for the safety of platform users.

BeReal has a higher threshold to view content — posts aren’t public or searchable online, and users must post their own BeReal before they can see their friends' posts or those from brands they follow. Because of this requirement, we felt it offered a unique opportunity to build a genuine community. Due to the necessity to post a BeReal to access our content, we felt people who were genuinely interested in us were more apt to follow us on this platform.

We appreciated that BeReal has no filters and no vanity metrics, though brand accounts can still see their follower count. Comments are not public by default. To leave a comment, a user must first engage with a brand's posts using RealMojis for an unspecified period before the platform recognizes them as a RealFan. Once deemed a RealFan, they can leave comments. However, these comments remain visible only to other RealFans unless the brand chooses to make them "public," which means they can't be seen by followers who aren't RealFans.

We also liked that it’s the fastest growing Gen-Z social media app. As of 2023, it had 25 million daily users, and 70 percent of those users were 14-24 years old. With the uncertainty of TikTok’s future, we felt good about being in a space that was attracting more of that audience segment.

Getting Started

I’ll be honest — our current social media team does not have the bandwidth to take on an entirely new social media platform. But an advantage of BeReal is that you can have up to 10 administrators in a brand account, and technically they could all post at the same time so there is no “bumping into each other.” There are also no limits on how many admins can post a BeReal in a day. So, we assembled an MIT BeReal team. We wanted our team to represent a broad spectrum of the Institute — arts, athletics, students, staff, faculty — and we were able to recruit people from a good cross-section of the Institute. We launched with seven members, with the hope that our team would post a pretty regular cadence of content and it wouldn’t fall on one person or my team to maintain the channel. Because it’s a low lift — it’s literally taking a photo of where you are at the moment on campus; no uploading, no editing, no long captions — it’s a volunteer team and those who are on it are enthusiastic about being a part of it.

We gave the team some basic guidelines, and they were off creating. Minutes after our first BeReal was posted, we had already gained a community of 13,000, which is BeReal’s way of tallying followers. We are currently at 48,000 and counting.