How normal are your social media stalking habits?

Most people would be pretty embarrassed if their social media stalking habits came to light.

Whether you’re someone who refreshes Snapchat a little too often, or you’ve delved three years deep into your ex’s sister’s golden retriever’s Instagram page, we’d usually rather keep it to ourselves.

But have you ever wondered how your online creeping habits compare to everyone else?

Luckily, we won’t have to start surreptitiously quizzing our friends on their night-time social media stalking, because Superdrug Online Doctor has done the job for us.

They surveyed 1,000 people to figure out what’s considered normal, and what’s, er, a little too much.

Activities were rated on a scale of one to 10 in terms of creepiness, and ranged from things like ‘looking at your social media for a couple of minutes’ to ‘trying to log into your social media account(s)’.

Strangely enough, the latter was only voted a 6.6 out of 10.

The study looked at the results of 500 Americans and 500 Europeans with an equal mix of males and females.

Checking up on an ex’s Twitter and Facebook accounts briefly came in with an average score of 2.1/10.

But having a browse of ‘more than 15 minutes’ only came in slightly higher with a score of 3/10.

Superdrug also looked at which methods are most common for finding out more about someone online.

69% of European women and 75.8% of men admitted to looking someone up on Facebook, compared to only 10.8% and 6.1% on Twitter, respectively.

There’s no recorded data for how intensely people looked (e.g. are you the type to reverse image search and add in workplace location? Nope, same here…) but with two billion active users, it’s safe to assume some of us are practically MI5 level now.

Unsurprisingly, most of us would rather pick our eyelashes off individually than admit to our actions, but Superdrug’s survey revealed 24.2% of Europeans and 10.4% of Americans have accidentally confessed our findings before.

Generally, women felt attempts to track their location were the creepiest followed by fake ‘accidental meet-ups’ based on location data.

Men were most unsettled by someone trying to hunt them down via location data.

If you’re still uncertain how you compare to other people, consider that nearly 30% of people have stalked their crush’s friends on social media and one in 10 has posted a photo hoping they’ll see it.

At the other end of the spectrum, only 4% surveyed have tracked their crush’s location, and 3% have tried to hack their social media accounts.

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