Social Media Addiction & Personality Types [Infographic]

It’s not exactly a secret that social media is a huge time sink for anyone who has become addicted to it. Everything from your work to your time with friends and loved ones suffers from your addiction, and before long, you’ll see and ignore the consequences. It’s a natural behavior amongst people who have become used to their social media addiction, and we all need to know how to spot it. Maybe that will enable us to take action before we start dwindling down the social media addiction spiral, only to find that we have no social interaction at all. Sound weird? It’s not as complicated as you might think. There is a healthy way to use social media, and we just need to balance it correctly, and we’ll be all good and dandy.

Some people get so deep into their social media addiction that all they do is publish witty and funny quotes, images and memes all day long in order to accumulate as many likes, retweets and comments as possible. Then there are people who are afraid to post anything at all because they feel they have to respond to every single response they get from it. Social media is a great tool, there’s no arguing that. However, it should be apparent to everyone that answering every single response we get is humanly impossible. For people with a small following of a couple hundred, this may be something that works, but if you have 10,000+ followers on Twitter for example, a response to every single response you get is ultimately impossible.

When we are talking about social media addiction, and the sickness it can really cause, there are several different types of personalities that have spawned through the years. Each one has its own unique approach to social media and the services it has to offer.

In a new infographic from Marketo (design by Column Five Media), we get a glimpse into these social media addiction personality types which helps us further pinpoint whether we have a social media addiction or not. If we do, it will show us what kind of addiction we have. I wouldn’t go so far as calling it funny, but it is interesting to me how serious some people take their social media. If you stop being you just because of it then what is the point in the first place?

When it comes to social media addiction, there will always be new breeds popping up. Why? Because with each new popular social media service, there will be an addiction connected to it. Nothing these days gets popular without a lot of people using it furiously. So, I guess social media addiction will never really disappear, it will just transform into different things. What we happen to get addicted to entirely depends on what we are into. If you can’t stop sharing pictures on Pinterest for example, I guess your addiction is something other than someone who tries to respond to every reply they get on a status update on Twitter. A healthy approach to social media is always the best one. A little mystery is always good. There is no need for everyone to know everything there is to know about you. If they know everything, what’s left to find out? Just a thought.