A Must-Know BeReal Feature

+ Why You Should Create GA4 Custom Dimensions

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Welcome to Part I of Edition No. 29 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.

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Contents

I. Tip: BeReal Photo Analysis

II. Analysis: Why You Should Create GA4 Custom Dimensions

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Tip: How To ‘Analyze’ BeReal Photos

If you haven’t tried it, BeReal is the new “it” app we’re all waiting to see whether can survive, or will go the way of other short-lived social media trends like FriendFeed, Meerkat and Yik Yak.

Here’s how it works: Every day, you and all your friends get a notification at the same time to “be real.” You then have two minutes to upload a photo.

The idea is that you’re caught off-guard, per se, so that your friends (and non-friends, if you so choose) see a “real” look into your life. The next day, everyone’s photos are gone except yours, which are private to you.

(If you miss the two-minute window, you can post a “BeReal Late” to reveal others’ shots that day.)

The novel but not original feature is that your phone takes a photo of both your front-facing and backward-facing camera at the same time. (The defunct Frontback app popularized this years ago.)

The result is something like this:

That stupid face I’m making is a pre-saved reaction option, which I did not use in in this case.

You have a Friends feed and a Discover feed in the app. (The above screenshot is from a random person in my Discover feed.)

Now, here’s the tip: While you can choose which of the two shots – from the front or back camera – uploads as the large one, others can easily flip them.

Simply tap the smaller of the two photos (the one in the top left).

These are the same two photos, but now their position has been flipped.

Want to get a better look? Simply pinch-zoom like you would for any other photo.

If Instagram – the King of Copying – has anything to say about this, BeReal won’t be around for long.

In the meantime, it can be a low-effort, low-time-consuming addition to your social media repertoire.

Did you find this tip useful? Share it to help spread the word.

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Analysis: Why You Should Create GA4 Custom Dimensions

Google Analytics has two types of custom definitions: dimensions and metrics.

Dimensions are word-based descriptors, while metrics are numbers-based statistics.

Today, we’re going to focus on the former, and talk about why they’re so important to your data.