Adding friends on social media won’t make you popular
Are you one of those people who add friends on social networking sites or blog catalogues to improve their exposure / readership / social status? YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME. Have you ever seen any rating for the amount of friends anywhere apart the number that shows how many friends you have? Have you ever considered the fact that having more than a 100 friends (depending on the type of network the number can be larger. Ie. Flickr as pointed out in the comments) on your list will seriously effect your credibility, unless you really ARE famous? Like it’s okay for Britney Spears to have 100000+ friends on her MySpace profile (if she has one) but if you’re more like Sally Nextdoor, having more than a hundred tells people that you are desperate for attention, you don’t have real friends, you don’t know the meaning of friends, and that you are currently spamming a lot of people with your personal crap.
If you think that having your profile picture displayed together with tons of other profiles will bring you traffic, you’re wrong. Do you know ANYONE who browses friends of friends beyond the Top Friends? I certainly don’t. So if you don’t have a real relationship with the person on your friend list, you won’t gain any advantage of it, quite the opposite.
This goes with BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog as well. The more friends you have, the less value YOU have to people you add. Why would anyone want to be one of your thousand friends? They know you don’t care. They know you won’t remember 15 minutes from the time you added them that you did. All you put out is negative vibes, as everyone knows you don’t have time to follow all these blogs even if it was the only thing you did in your life – and that would make you officially pathetic if you did.
The more popular you are in reality, the less you tend to make “add me” requests, because you don’t have to. You don’t have to beg for attention, and you start to clear out the bulk from your friends list to keep only those you really are interested in. That shows your real friends you give value to them, and it shows people you wish to know, that you are not over worked by the number of people you have to socialise with so that they too may have a chance to actually getting to know you.
If anyone has a real good reason to do this, and it being so popular I would imagine someone has some rationale behind it, please do share if you dare!
14 Comments
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
- And in the end… the love you make, is equal to the love you take « - [...] in vogue once again. This does not mean adding every random you find on facebook as a friend as Sebastyne ...
Leave a Reply
Follow Me!
I don’t think that is as dangerous as deliberately going around these sites adding people without ever checking who they are. (Like on BlogCatalog you can see their feeds: “Added Tony Single as their friend 1 minute ago – Added Sebastyne as their friend 2 minutes ago, etc.” Just if the numbers start to tally up, it might be good to clean out some people who you have no idea who they are, or have no relevance to you at all.
OMG, I just checked the number of friends on my BlogCatalog. 140! I have accepted every request that I got, just to be polite. I had no idea there were that many. I’ll have to clean up now.
On Flickr you can actually follow a lot more people than on a blogging network, because it only takes you a few seconds to look at a photo, but it takes you at least 5 minutes to read a blog post. What I mean by this is that some people add friends for absolutely no other reason but to a) appear popular / famous / successful b) hope that their “friends” will read their blog or what ever they’re promoting. If you truly are interested in these people and are fast enough to keep track of all of them, then I would have no qualms about having you on my friends list, but I would not want you to be there just cluttering up the space from people who I actually would follow if I could find them on the list of avatars!
I already took at look at my list of Mybloglog
friends and separated my immediate contacts
from my followers.
Now the next step is to sort and filter out
those who have nothing in common with me
and those are the one’s I may lose.
Having too many will just clutter up my contact base
and make it harder to find the friends that I do want to reach immediately.:smile:
Jeunelle Fosters last blog post..The Bank Just Ripped Me Off For 1 Penny
Hmmm… it is a good point you raise.
I think I make the mistake of adding people as friends merely because they added me first. It’s that whole “I don’t want to be rude” thing, but I didn’t think of the credibility issue. I probably should…
Tony Singles last blog post..Gerald the Hating Fridge [Trottersville #84]
Excellent job on this! Your post got to the very heart of my question yesterday on the BC forum! Thank you for posting this.
Melinda
mtyler77s last blog post..Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained!
I agree with your general sentiment, but it seems to me that it only applies to casual use of the internet. Sure, on certain sites I agree with you, such as MySpace and Facebook, but I (along with others) add contacts on Flickr because I like the way some people see the world and want to see more of their work, or twitter, which I use as an idea and link sharing medium where I (and others) add professional contacts with the same interests as me. So perhaps adding friends won’t make you popular in the teenage ego sense, but done strategically in certain circumstances it may expose you to a host of new ideas and perspectives that you would not have otherwise had access too.
Before accepting the provocation to dare/share,
I made sure I read from ‘More About Me’ and I found what I was suspecting to: “….but I would love to have an active community of clever and humorous people from all walks of life. My ultimate wish is to start a lively discussion board that would co-exist with my blog, creating a place that a lot of people would consider a home of some sort”. I have managed to develop online friends of the clever and humorous kind at Facebook.I’m with your[and other commenters']views on the other type of social networking sites. It may be difficult to spot intelligent bloggers who write content of substance, but when I do, I do everything I can to keep some association with them. Dare to accept me at Facebook? [credentials at evolveever.com!][I'm convinced with my exploration following my stumble here] 
Pushhyarags last blog post..Tribulations of an Evolving Blogger.
Interesting. How have you managed to make friends on Facebook?
I have been a member a long time, and I have grown to love the place, but I can’t say I had made any friends there. All of the people on my list are my real friends that I’ve made in “the real life” or on other websites. (You will be the exception to that rule, because I was too curious not to add you. :p )
Thank you for your invite and reading my “about me” page. Yey!
Yeah, I think you’re right about all that adding of friends. Heck I deleted myself from most of those social networking sites and still get the same amount of traffic on my blog and now I have a lot more time to visit blogs rather than hanging around networking sites adding “friends” LOL … it’s all what you enjoy I guess. For me all that other stuff was taking my focus away from what I enjoy.
Well Majed Salih, you fall into a little bit different category as a musician. Probably those 5000 people enjoy your music, and that is why they have added you and contact you. That means that you have something to offer them. However, most people who just randomly add people to their social networks don’t have anything to offer, and are of no value to the person they add.
I’m glad you enjoy your social networking, I enjoy that too. I just don’t enjoy having tons of friends who first add me and never contact me. I wouldn’t mind having 5000 friends who do, so consider yourself lucky.
1st thing my real name is majed salih,
livin in Syria
im in 2nd year fine art college and Music producer/composer also
19 years old only !
Medievil-Music Is my music Nickname !(i have 7 years exp)
well ………………..
this is all craaaaPPPss !i am now So Popular cause of the Social Media Networks ! i have 3 personal emails and every one of them contains more than 5000 human been(contacts)!
i dont care if u believe or not but im enjoying my real and digital life 2geather!!!!
Medievil@Musician.orgs last blog post..ORIENTALIC SITAR of PERSIaNS-medievil music.mp3 by Medievil-Music
Interesting again. I actually have looked at friends of people beyond the top ones but I guess I'm weird. This article made me stop and think. I'm pretty new to this and your viewpoints do intrigue me.
Interesting again. I actually have looked at friends of people beyond the top ones but I guess I'm weird. This article made me stop and think. I'm pretty new to this and your viewpoints do intrigue me.