How important is social media profiles in Thai culture?

No judgement or offense intended (if it does cause any to Thais, I sincerely apologize in advance). Asking purely out of curiosity and to better understand Thai culture and business.

There is a bit of a movement in some countries where detaching oneself from social media is a bit of a trend. Its seen as being more grounded as opposed to being superficial and showing off, and focusing more on the more direct aspects of your life.

I know more than a handful of extremely successful people that now only have a Linkedin profile as their only source of social media and maybe a Twitter account just to monitor news. Facebook is more of a past relic for a lot of grown in the west (its not as popular as 10 years ago) and many have deleted their personal Instagram accounts as a means of enforcing self control.

However in Thailand, I’ve heard a few times that having a strong social media presence with the purpose of showing your “class” is a very important factor when it comes to befriending locals or doing business.

The gist I got was that not having social media makes it seem like you’re a nobody and a lot of locals will look down at you if you say you don’t use social media anymore. Conversely, if you have pics of yourself vacationing in Florida, drinking coffee in Paris, attending events in Monaco, etc. local people tend to treat you on a pedestal. The going reason is that Thais will look at your profile and judge whether you are either above or beneath them in “class” which is apparently a big aspect of Thai society.

On a more personal experience side, this argument does kind of make sense in a way because no people I’ve seen come remotely closer to Thais in being really into taking pictures for their social media in any part of the world.

Showing off on social media is not specific to Thailand. But I hear Thailand is of the few places where its not uncommon for even business contacts to ask you for your Insta handle. But in western culture, unless your profile is linked directly to business, asking for a business contact’s Insta is quite unheard of.

So at the end of the day I guess my real question boils down to whether someone should re-open their instagram profiles and re-activate their Facebook if they want to be taken seriously in Thailand.

Thank you!

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