Miquela Sousa, or @LilMiquela, as she’s known to her fans, behaves like your typical Instagram influencer. She posts lots of selfies, attends the hottest parties and events in her city, promotes designer clothes and generally strives to create the illusion of a perfect lifestyle. There’s just one thing that makes her special – she’s not a real person, but a very realistic-looking computer-generated model.

@LilMiquela only set up her Instagram account last year, but she already has over 250,000 fans, called “Miquelites”, who like and share her every post, complimenting her on her beauty, makeup skills, and sense of style. Miquela keeps them coming back by regularly posting new content and engaging them in the comments section, thanking them for their kind words and even swapping makeup tips. She does everything a human social media star would do, but she’s not human, we don’t think.

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Some people spend a fortune trying to keep themselves looking young, but one Polish social media star admits he only found success after making himself look at least 10 years older than he actually is. Meet Pawel Ladziak, aka “Polish Viking”.

Pawel often gets mentioned as one of the hottest-looking men over 40, and admits that some people who see his photos think that he’s around 60-years-old. And who can blame them? After all, he must be pretty old for his hair to have gone completely white, right? Well, Pawel Ladziak is only 35-years-old, and dyes his hair and beard white frequently in order to maintain this older look. And for good reason, as he credits this transformation for his social media success.

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Want to brag about your active social life on Facebook, when you really have no friends? Trying to make your ex jealous by posing with an attractive new partner, but can’t find a date? No need to worry, this Japanese company will happily send you some fake friends or lovers for a fun photo shoot that will make your online friends green with envy. You’ll have to pay for it, though.

Keeping up appearances on social media is apparently very important to a lot of people, and Japanese company Family Romance is committed to helping its clients do just that. Whether they are looking to show co-workers that they are much more fun to be around than they appear to be at the office, or trying to impress a special someone with their active social life, the company’s Real Appeal service aims to help them succeed, by providing some fake friends for impressive photo shoots. Clients can then post these pics on their Facebook or Instagram pages to show everyone how fun their life is, without anyone knowing it’s all a paid-for illusion.

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After waking up one day to find that her popular Facebook page had been taken down by Facebook, and after getting no reply to her messages, a young girl from Belgium eventually got on a plane to San Francisco to confront Facebook about the issue in person.

23-year-old Jamilla Baidou is somewhat of a celebrity in Belgium. She was a contender on the Belgian version of The Voice, in 2014, when she managed to impress both the judges and the nationwide audience with her musical talent. People wanted to see more of her even after she was eliminated from the popular TV show, so she kept them up to date with her projects on social media networks like Facebook and YouTube. Up until December 2016, she had amassed more than 157,000 fans and many of the videos she posted had over one million times. Vlogging had become her profession, and her Facebook page was the most important platform, but one day disaster struck – her page suddenly disappeared.

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Reaching stardom on popular social networks like Facebook or Instagram is relatively easy when you’re a successful artist or athlete, but you can also make it big if you’re simply a very attractive person, or if you’re obscenely rich. But how does a 20-year-old average girl from Warsaw, Poland who posts fairly unimpressive photos of her day to day life get over 100,000 followers on Instagram without even showing her face?

That’s the big misery surrounding Natalia Gutkiewicz’s success story. In the three years since she’s been on Instagram, Natalia has made just 443 posts – pretty low compared to other Instagram stars – which have however attracted 101,000 followers. So how did she do it? Well, the 20-year-old believes that it has to do with the fact that she has never shown her full face in any of her posts. Yes, you can sometimes see one of her eyes, her lips, the back of her head, but nobody actually knows what she looks like. She’s usually the one taking photos of her friends, as she considers herself a narrator, and her Instagram account a view of the world through her eyes, but in the few photos she appears in, you never get a good look at her face.

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Rubi Ibarra García, a 15-year-old girl from the small Mexican village of La Joya had arguably the highest attended quinceañera party in history, after thousands of people from all over Mexico, and even the U.S. turned up for the big event on December 26.

It all started earlier this month, when Rubi’s father, Crescencio, posted a video on Facebook inviting everyone to the girl’s birthday party. “We invite you on December 26 to our daughter Rubi Ibarra Garcia’s quinceañera in La Joya, everyone is cordially invited,” he wrote. Only he didn’t really mean “everyone”, just everyone in the village, but after setting the video to ‘public’ instead of ‘private’, people from all over Mexico started sharing it and Rubi eventually ended up with with over 1.2 million RSVPs from people she had never met before.

Crescencio later revealed that the invitation was meant for neighbors and friends only, but acknowledged his mistake, adding that he would not tun anyone away. In the weeks that followed, Rubi’s quinceañera became one of the most popular topic in Mexico, with the #XVdeRuby trending on social media and getting millions of shares, and TV stations scrambling to cover the story and get interviews with the García family. Actor Gael Garcia Bernal made a parody of the invitation video, while singer Luis Antonio Lopez “El Mimoso” composed a song especially for the birthday girl. Mexican airline Intejet even offered a 30% discount on flights to her home state for people wanting to attend. 

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An Australian takeaway place is trying to win a Guinness World Record by having their mascot Betty become the first chicken to ever send a readable tweet! The marketing campaign is a lot like shooting in the dark – they’re letting Betty peck away randomly at a keyboard, hoping that she will accidentally tweet something meaningful by the end of October. 

Perth marketing agency Marketforce came up with the idea for their client ‘Chicken Treat’, who operate over 70 franchises in Western Australia. “Betty will be tweeting away until she sends a proper five-letter word in English,” the promotional video states. “Follow her as she makes history at the Chicken Tweet Twitter page.”  

According to independent brand analyst Michel Hogan, it’s great that a company is using humour in its marketing. “This isn’t a new idea by any means, but I can see it working – depending on where they go with it and how they do it,” she said. She added that smaller chains need such stunts and tricks to grab eyeballs in an industry that is dominated by larger corporations.

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Twitter, along with countless other social media websites, is often viewed as a productivity killer. But a small town in Spain has actually been using the platform to improve communication between authorities and the people. In fact, Twitter is so important to the people of Jun that they actually built a monument of the iconic ‘blue bird’ in the town’s square.

Since September 2011, the 3,500-strong community has used Twitter to spread local news, developments, job opportunities, orbituaries, and even school dinner menus! Residents book doctor’s appointments, register consumer complaints, and report crimes through their tweets. Jun’s Mayor, José Antonio Rodriguez Salas, has his own account, with a massive following of over 340,000. Locals can contact the Mayor by tweeting him directly.

All the town’s public services, including the police force, have their own Twitter accounts. The force, consisting of only one officer, drives a squad car with ‘@PoliciaJun’ painted on the bonnet. In fact, the bird logo can be seen everywhere, including the Mayor’s office. Even the guy who sweeps the streets tweets amusing messages, with before and after shots of his handiwork.  The town’s elderly aren’t ignored either – there’s a special program in place to teach them how to use the internet and social media.

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In a brilliant use of social media, a news show in Panama City gave potholes in the streets their own voices on Twitter. The crew of Telemetro Reporta installed motion-sensitive devices in craters across the city, programmed to tweet authorities every time cars ran over them, until they fixed the problem!

The makers of the show said that they wanted to highlight how horrible the roads of the city had become. Despite having one of the fastest growing economies of Central and South America and a concentration on skyscrapers that earned it the nickname ‘Dubai of Latin America’, Panama City’s streets were pockmarked with holes and ditches that made every commute a nightmare.

“It would seem that in a rush to build a modern city, Panama forgot to take care of its existing streets, creating a contradiction of modern buildings and damaged streets,” the show’s promo declares. “This is not amusing for the people that drive on the streets every day.”

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I never thought I’d live to see the day when Tweets could replace a student’s academic performance. But it’s actually becoming a popular trend. Teachers all over the United States are promising to cancel final exams if their students manage to get a sufficient number of retweets. I’m not sure the teachers always mean it, but it appears that the students are their deals quite seriously.

It all started with one opportunistic student – Andrew Muennink of Round Rock High School in Texas – who struck a sweet deal with his art teacher. Andrew is quite popular on Twitter, with over 2,300 followers. “I try my best and the final is supposed to be so hard, so I was like, ‘I have lots of followers on Twitter’”.

So he decided to leverage his vast following to his benefit. He approached his art teacher on 7 May and succeeded in striking a deal – if he could get 15,000 retweets by 12 p.m. on May 23rd, his class would be excused from taking the art final. His post spread quickly all over the internet, and he achieved his goal long before the deadline.

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Frustrated by the amount of time they spent on Facebook during workdays, two MIT doctoral candidates have created the Pavlov Poke, a keyboard palm rest that sends electric shocks whenever the user spends too much time on “email, social networking, or other online distractions”.

Robert R. Morris and Dan McDuff are both Ph.D. candidates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but like millions of other internet users out there, they are also social media addicts. After estimating they waste a combined 50 hours a week on Facebook, the two decided to take a new approach to fighting social media addiction by using electroshock therapy to keep users from wasting most of their days on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Named after the well-known Russian psychologist who performed behavioral experiments on dogs, the Pavlov Poke is a keyboard accessory programmed to send electrical shocks into users whenever they spend too much time scrolling through their Facebook news feed or browsing on distracting websites. The shocks are strong enough to make you react, but while they are unpleasant they are not dangerous.

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If you’re one of those people who can’t stop tweeting even when they are on vacation, you might find the world’s first Twitter-themed hotel, in Magaluf, Spain, to be the perfect summer destination.

Ever-growing customer demands, the need for diversity and the increasing number of social media addicts all over the world have inspired Meliá Hotels International, the leading hotel chain in Spain, to create the world’s first ever Twitter hotel. Located in Magaluf, Mallorca, the @SolWaveHouse Hotel allows guests to interact with its staff and other tourists via text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. The hotel’s General Manager, Gonzalo Echevarría, says “the hotel takes a new step in meeting the expectations of an increasingly experiential and social customer profile, through new technologies.” At the heart of this social-media-themed hotel is #SocialWave, a virtual community accessible only from its wifi via smartphone, tablet or computer. Once they’ve registered with their Twitter accounts, guests can use #SocialWave to connect with other tourists, chat, share photos and even flirt by sending virtual kisses. There’s a special hashtag for pretty much everything, and two Twitter Concierges are always standing by t meet guest requests via Twitter and generate conversation in this virtual community.

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