I have lots of friends. Well, at least Facebook tells me I do. I don’t think I’ve ever asked anyone to be my friend on Facebook (certainly no more than a handful if at all), yet I have 117 friends. Honestly, they are more like acquaintances, and some of them I don’t really know at all. I mean, I couldn’t pick them out of a lineup, much less tell you their names or anything I know about them. It got me to wondering about how we use social networks—and how some people use them very differently from me.
117 is not a really big social network as Facebook networks, go. I have 285 contacts on LinkedIn, which isn’t very much, either. I have 234 followers on Twitter.
But that’s because I am a passive networker. I accept every invitation that comes my way and I hardly ever send one. My social networks are not much more than an extension of my address book—just a way to keep in touch with people in case I need to contact them again.
But that’s not how my daughter uses Facebook. She has a tightly-knit group of real friends that she knows offline and she organizes a lot of communication around that. So one difference is whether you use social networks for personal networking or business networking, but I wonder if another difference is generational.
I use e-mail and instant messaging as electronic ways of keeping up with people, rather than social networking. My daughter rarely uses e-mail. But in a few years (fewer than I’d care to think about), she’ll be entering the work world and I wonder how she’ll dice up her social networking then. Or maybe she won’t have that work/personal split that I do.
I think I am missing something about social networking. It took me a while to warm up to Twitter, and even now I doubt I am doing great things with it. But I treat all social networks as though my acquaintances are followers rather than friends. As I embark on a change in my career where I will be working more than ever with social media (even purporting to be some kind of quasi-expert), I wonder whether I need to change my pattern in social media to learn more. It’s something that I am definitely thinking about, and people who know me (my real friends), know how dangerous that can be…
