Repost Fever
This semester, I’ve been taking a Sports Marketing course that has welcomed a wide range of guest speakers who manage brands in the sports industry. A few weeks back, following a Q&A, one of these guest speakers from ESPN posed a question back to us as audience members. Genuinely curious, he asked us what kind of marketing methods we believe are most effective in directing Gen Z toward brands. Immediately, I raised my hand and explained that in my opinion, our generation and the generations coming up are obsessed with self-perception. We consume from places that promise to help curate our personal brands. We know so many people are capable of looking at us through screens 24/7, so we put higher importance on the image of self we are portraying.
Social media is the clearest perpetuator of this hyperawareness of self, with ultra-personalized online profiles, individually targeted advertisements with an end goal of knowing most precisely what a user will buy, and the complex cultural etiquette around these platforms that dictate meaningless “do’s and don’ts.” Social media and marketing are one and the same today, and as a result, the designers of these platforms have honed in on how to further optimize self-branding features that entice advertisers to keep investing. One of the most recent cases of this that I observed is the spread of the “Repost” button across social platforms. I was inspired to comment on the power of this button after its latest installment on Instagram over the summer. TikTok added its Repost button back in 2022, likely inspired by the repost to profile concept that the “Retweet” on Twitter pioneered. Even LinkedIn has a repost button now.
If you are unfamiliar, pressing Repost within a post on any of these platforms and beyond (Twitter’s Retweet became Repost with Elon Musk’s takeover and transition to X) means one user is sharing another user’s post to a section of their profile designated for reposts. Reposts typically encompass something a user thinks is funny, something that includes information they want to disperse to their network, or really anything they find interesting enough to co-sign as part of their own page. On these platforms, you don’t have to click on a specific person’s page to see their reposts, as the posts will appear on the reposter’s followers’ feeds with a sign of who reposted the video. This means that anytime a user reposts something, they are essentially saying, “I want the people I follow to see this,” and more specifically, “I want them to know I was the one that sent it to them.”
The feature functions with slight differences across platforms and has evolved as a tool of self-branding over time. Twitter’s Retweet was certainly the most public and politically charged version of the feature. At a time when the realities of audience and visibility in social media was still an extremely new and naive concept across the board, many did not realize how socially risky retweeting was compared to privately liking. TikTok’s repost moved in a different direction, emphasizing a push onto followers’ feeds, making it more passive and slightly more anonymous, as users would have to manually go into one’s profile and find the repost section of their page to scroll through the whole list. Unlike TikTok, Instagram is more often associated with a degree of professional capacity, making its Repost feature a somewhat in-between of passive and active, as it operates the same as TikTok, just with a more subtle symbol that a user reposted the content, as it only shows a profile picture rather than saying “Name reposted” like on TikTok and X.
To pull from my personal experience as a social media user, my TikTok reposts are often lyric videos and performances from my favorite artists and songs, edits of shows and movies I like, and funny content from my friends. On X, I repost really anything I find remotely funny, along with similar things to my TikTok reposts. On Instagram, because the feature is largely new and my following there includes a lot more people I don’t know as well, I am noticeably more selective about what I re-share, with only a few posts from my friends that I am in and a couple music-related posts I want people to see I like. I think my instinct to re-share less there aligns directly with the idea of awareness of audiences relative to reposts. Because I have a looser sense of who my audience is on any given day, both those viewing my Instagram profile and those in my following whose feeds my reposts might infiltrate, I take less risk in self-describing with reposts.
This instinct to carefully curate how we are perceived is not new. Decades before social media, sociologist Erving Goffman described this behavior as “impression management,” arguing that people are always performing for an audience and actively shaping the image they present. What platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X have done is amplify this performance to an unprecedented scale. The awareness I described earlier now exists in a space where every action is visible and shareable. Even something as quick and seemingly low-effort as reposting something becomes a point of how others construct our identity.
I became further interested in the repost button and what it illustrates more broadly about Gen Z’s behaviors after a conversation with friends about stalking other people’s reposts to learn about things that person is going through. A friend showed me the reposts of someone she knew going through a breakup, and surely enough, the most recent chunk of their re-shared videos had something to do with heartbreak and not believing in love. This kind of interacting with online platforms is not new or uncommon, as research shows that people now read social media profiles to the same degree as we read body language. According to a 2024 piece in El País, social media activity has become a system of signals that people now use to interpret who someone is and what they have experienced. The article found that Gen Z takes digital body language into account more than any other generation, noting that 77% of people feel that someone’s digital behavior reveals a lot about their identity.
The repost button has formalized and amplified this instinct to understand others through the internet, giving people a dedicated, scrollable archive of what someone else is relating to at the moment. One caveat to this is the paradox of reality on social media, as users will always be prone to self-regulation and censorship on a platform that anyone can view at any time. Still, the repost button remains one of the more honest gestures on social media. Unlike a carefully crafted photo dump or TikTok video, reposting is instant and reactive, making the user less prone to careful consideration of how followers could further interpret it beyond just noticing that the user endorses this video. The impulsiveness of a repost is also what makes it even more alluring now to brands, as the already-successful strategy of ads disguised as regular feed posts becomes even more likely to be quickly reposted by “unsuspecting” users, further dispersing the brand without the brand having to promote themselves on such a scale.
Furthering how brands and the act of reposting intertwine, the smartest brands have taken these Gen-Z patterns to change their strategy from “how do we make our product look appealing” to “how do we make consumers look appealing for using our product.” An example of this that I can think of is the beauty brand Glossier, which built its image around making its users seem effortlessly cool rather than just making the product look effortlessly cool. Glossier promotes minimal, aesthetic content that feels personal and relatable so when someone is associated with it through use and posting on social media, they’re signaling that they align with a certain lifestyle and image.
While this has always been a strategy of selling in some capacity, feelings of constant perception and desire to be understood through virtual profiles has made this mindset the most successful. In reposting content from a brand—which can encompass anything from a singer’s team marketing their next single to a makeup company selling lipgloss—a user attaches the brand to their identity, simultaneously building their personal brand and extending the brand's reach. There is definitely effort involved in making content palatable and as “anti-marketing” as possible to make users want to put it on their feeds for free, but it can be done.
While a small and, at this point, not-that-noticeable button that re-shares content is not exactly revolutionary, its implications about who we are as a generation raised online are big. Curation of the self is an art form that the designers of these platforms pushed to make profitable. Social media will never again be just about posting and communicating, as it is now a tool for saying things about the world and ourselves we do not want to say outright. All of this said, understanding the psychology and marketing implications behind all of this has not made me any less likely to repost a Jess and Nick New Girl edit the second one crosses my feed.
