I consider myself to be a friendly guy. Maybe my gregarious nature is what helped me to be successful in sales; maybe it’s what helps me play golf or hang out at a party with total strangers and be comfortable. But I’ve been thinking lately that maybe I’ve over-reached a bit. You see, lately when I look at my LinkedIn connections or even some of my Facebook friends, I wonder who they are. Why that’s a little scary to me is that I’ve really tried over the years to keep Facebook to my personal friends, not business connections or people who know others that I know but whom I’ve never met. I used to have a LinkedIn policy that I had to have met the connection in person but that went out the window a long time ago. Still, I try not to accept random people as connections and yet I’ve got a few dozen that I can’t place at all.
Turns out I’m not alone. This is from the Pew Internet and American Life study:
Social network users are becoming more active in pruning and managing their accounts. Women and younger users tend to unfriend more than others.
About two-thirds of internet users use social networking sites (SNS) and all the major metrics for profile management are up, compared to 2009: 63% of them have deleted people from their “friends” lists, up from 56% in 2009; 44% have deleted comments made by others on their profile; and 37% have removed their names from photos that were tagged to identify them.
That’s less of a big deal to businesses than this:
Privacy appears to be the new preference of social media denizens. The majority of social network users (58 percent) have set their profiles to private, and just 20 percent of adults said their profiles remained public.
Marketers have a vested interest both in networks being large and users being discoverable. When we all start to contract those networks – who ARE these all these “friends” anyway? – it runs contrary to those interests.
The above two items gave me pause. You?
Consult Keith 