Paranormal activity in social media

With Halloween approaching, we’ll soon see kids (and more than a few adults) dressed up as their favorite scary creatures. All manner of make-believe zombies, vampires and ghosts will come knocking on our doors.

Fortunately, Halloween happens just one night a year. And it’s all in fun. Those ghouls and monsters aren’t real.

What IS real, unfortunately, are the social media manifestations of these nightmarish archetypes. As this Steamfeed Media post points out, for some social media users, every day is Fright Night.

Steamfeed’s Carrie Keenan describes the three most common types of social media spooks:

• The zombie. Known by their mindless auto-tweets and RSS feeds, these mindless creatures are easy to spot. “Hold onto your brains when you see them coming and run!”
• The ghost. “A ghost user is one who creates a business account because they ‘should’ be involved in social media,” Keenan writes. “They soon disappear into the internet ether never to be seen again.”
• The vampire. These blood-sucking creatures “take your hard work and give themselves credit,” scraping content from your blog or website and passing it off as their own.

There may be more fiends out there, but these are three common ones in social media.

It’s okay to pretend to be one of these on Halloween. Just remember to be a real human the rest of the year. The same goes for your social media identityo.

Photo of ComicCon 2013 Zombie Walk by Hooman.

Author: andrewcareaga

Former higher ed PR and marketing guy at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) now focused on freelance writing and editing and creative writing, fiction and non-fiction. View all posts by andrewcareaga