Share your experiences with Facebook, Instagram, and/or other social networking sites. If you don't use social networking sites, respond hypothetically. Think about the psychological effects social media has on you (positive and negative) and weave into the analysis the terms social comparison (upward or downward comparison), impression management, and self-esteem in your response and use bold to emphasize them

My perception of social media is that it is fun and a very effective platform to connect and keep in-touch with friends as often as we could. It can become deleterious to one's self-evaluation, however, due to the abundant social comparison opportunities it unknowingly provides. 

Step-by-step explanation

With the use of social media comes the exposure to other people's lives that they want their friends or followers to see. It is up to us, social media users, how to take in the information we see and how we would want it to affect our daily lives. Personally, one can be passive and just take it as a news feed for knowing what's up to date. However, a tendency of us to compare ourselves to other people as we engage in social media may also occur. Such is known as social comparison. For instance, suppose I find myself comparing me in my head to someone who I see is much for fashionable, or much more successful-looking, then what I am doing is upward social comparison. It is different when I realize I am comparing myself to someone who I perceive to me inferior than me or someone I think has negative characteristics, wherein what I am doing is downward social comparison. There is a higher tendency to engage in upward social comparison in social media, for instance in Facebook, as it is an attractive platform for self-presentation wherein users can take their time to strategically construct online personas that emphasize their most desirable traits. This is called impression management, and in contrast to face-to-face interactions which do not allow for the same degree of contemplation or flexibility. 

As a consequence of frequent upward social comparison we do on social media, it may create a negative impact on one's self-evaluations and self-esteem. Heavy users of social media may affect their trait self-esteem due to long-term exposure to social media platforms because it results to frequent comparisons they do of themselves from others. If it is just brief exposure such as myself who don't engage in social media as often then it could affect my state self-esteem more than my trait self-esteem.