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The mobile app BeReal has taught us that we are all essentially the same: unkempt, unscripted, and a little boring. Now it wants us to see that celebrities and brands are just like us too.
The social media platform announced this week that, beginning February 6, celebrities and brands will officially join regular users on the app. They’ll be given verified accounts, and they’ll appear in the app as “RealPeople” or “RealBrands.” Regular users will be able to follow these official accounts (as “RealFans”) and engage with them by tagging them in posts; the celebrities and brands can then re-share their fans’ posts in their feeds.
“You're going to discover what the biggest celebrities are doing behind the scenes at the exact same time as you,” says BeReal’s chief operating officer Romain Salzman.
BeReal’s appeal lies in its mundanity, its messiness, and its feeling of immediacy. Every day at a random time, the app’s 23 million users receive a notification prompting them to take two photos in rapid succession, one using the phone’s main camera and one using the selfie camera, with just two minutes to complete the task. The spontaneous photos captured by the main camera are fun and scrappy: an open laptop on a bed showing a fuzzy freeze frame of a streamed TV episode, half-sauteed vegetables sizzling on a stovetop, a pair of legs standing on a subway platform. Each is accompanied by a spur-of-the-moment selfie shown discreetly in the corner. Users’ feeds are flooded with these informal peeks into the worlds of their friends. Even life’s more thrilling moments—a house party, a musical festival, or an upscale dinner out—appear exceptionally regular within BeReal’s constraints and barebones interface.
Celebrities and brands are being invited to show their raw and unrefined selves right alongside us. BeReal does not plan to offer them any special features or privileges, Sazlman says. And unlike on TikTok and Instagram, celebrities and brands on BeReal will not be able to pretty up their posts with filters, nor will they be able to pre-plan or schedule their posts. Salzman notes that every user, public figures and corporate entities alike, will receive the app’s signature “It’s time to BeReal” notification at the exact same time.
“We wanted to be aligned with our DNA and the way to do that was to make sure that the celebrities and brands play by the exact same rule as the users do,” he says.
By ensuring that every account adheres to the same set of rules, Salzman hopes that regular users will find commonality between themselves and those behind verified accounts. He made clear that he does not want this development to threaten the app’s distinct culture or sacrifice the sense of integrity central to its identity.
Salzman describes social media giants like Instagram and Twitter as “broadcasting platforms where the 1 percent shares their best life with the 99 percent.” This culture of boastfulness perpetuates mental health issues, he says, and overwhelmingly affects teenagers and especially young girls. Data from the market research firm YPulse confirms this sentiment: 58 percent of females ages 13 to 39, and 48 percent of males of the same age demographic, agree that social media makes them feel bad about their appearance.
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Salzman says the presence of brands and celebrities on his platform will not be characterized by grandiosity. Instead, the app’s spontaneous nature will strip these idolized figures and brands of their glamor and larger-than-life personas.
Timing Is Everything
Jeremy Goldman, Senior Director at the marketing research firm Insider Intelligence, compares the objective of BeReal’s new features to that of Instagram’s Stories. While Stories were meant to highlight casual, spur-of-the-moment snapshots of everyday life, the presence of public figures and corporate entities reshaped their impact. “When celebrities and major creators got involved, Stories became a lot more curated,” Goldman says. “It would be a surprise if there didn't wind up being a degree of curation [on BeReal] if this all goes ‘to plan.’”
Brands have been experimenting with BeReal for a while. And February 6 won’t be the first time celebrities will log on. Public figures—including Billie Eilish and Joe Jonas—have used the app informally, and BeReal has (presumably also informally) toyed with casual celebrity partnerships.
For example, one daily BeReal photo prompt went out at the exact same time as the release of Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated album, 1989 (Taylor’s Version). Salzman, recalling the surprising serendipity of this timing, coyly asked, “Who would have thought,” subtly implying that this synchronization was intentional. (This is despite the app’s official statement claiming it “truly does not know” when notifications are sent).
“It was beautiful because you could see millions of Swifties taking their BeReal of the moment where they discovered the new album,” Salzman says. “In the future, you could imagine them tagging Taylor Swift for that moment, and then potentially getting reshared.” Salzman imagines that the new feature will add to the fan experience, but declined to answer whether he plans to time future BeReal notifications with celebrity and brand announcements.
Brands in particular will have to be especially calculated in their use of the app, says MaryLeigh Bliss, YPulse’s chief content officer. “It has to be, in some way, a promotional moment,” she says. If the timing of the notification is truly unknown to brands, they’ll have to work hard to correct for the unpredictability of the notification—a given brand’s social media manager can’t be caught at a competitor’s store, after all.
“I think there's a lot of construction that can go around these moments,” says Bliss. “And I think if you are a public facing figure, you're likely going to be really strategic about what you're showing.”
Filter Bubble
The BeReal experience so far has differed dramatically from that of TikTok and Instagram. Both typically host feeds saturated with heavily filtered faces, digitally altered bodies, tightly edited compositions, wordy graphics, and branded content, all curated in such a way that often prioritizes the platforms’ most impersonal posts. In contrast, BeReal, with its charming dullness, seeks to combat some of legacy social media’s toxicity by discouraging the false glorification of everyday life.
French entrepreneur Romain Salzman came on board as BeReal’s COO in 2021, about a year after its initial launch, and a year before activity on the platform peaked—in November 2022, 21 percent of North Americans ages 13 to 17 reported using the app, and it was named Apple’s “App of the Year” the same year.
Now, its grip on the public consciousness is slipping; just 10 percent of that same demographic still use the app. BeReal has been slow to adopt new features, possibly in an effort to maintain its reputation as a people-first platform. “They’re realizing that their market penetration a few years in is just not where it could be,” says Goldman. “The platform has just been a bit slow to take that money and to be receptive to it.”
But the primitive model is not sustainable from a business standpoint, Goldman says. “It's very difficult to get more money from any investor when you say, ‘We’re totally fine where we are. We're an afterthought in the social media world and we're cool with that,’” he says, noting that as of 2023, four percent of Gen Z and just one percent of the overall population used BeReal, according to his firm’s research. “Good luck raising a little bit more to launch new features if that's what your MO is.”
While eventual monetization is certainly part of the plan, according to Salzman, it’s “definitely not a priority today.” Nevertheless, he is committed to preserving the app’s unpretentious reputation.
