Yisel Guajardo is an entrepreneur who writes about internet marketing, social media, and blogging. She authors the blog Advanced Income. You can also follow her on Twitter.
The debate hit the Internet Marketing world last week when Ed Dale announced on his blog he’s flushing most of his Facebook friends and starting fresh.
(Why did flushing, friends, and fresh just seem weird to me? Anyway.)
It really isn’t anything new, the desire to have lots of friends on the social networking sites is viewed as a type of social validation. You know, “Hey I’m cool, look at all the friends I have”.
Come on, admit it. How cool did you look on MySpace when Tom was your only friend?
Hey, I’m just saying…I’m not pointing any fingers, I fell for it too. 
But this led to a mad rush to add friends as quickly as possible with friend adding software and viral gizmos and gadgets that are still prevalent to this day. Especially on Twitter.
Yet time has shown, that just like in the real world, it’s not the number of friends or followers, but who is actually listening and cares what you have to say.
You can’t fake influence. Just like men can’t fake…well, you know. It’s either there or not.
So here we are, a ton of useless friends that put in question our use of social media socially.
Huh? Well, the cartoon below says it all. Are you so busy adding friends that you are missing out on the real value of the sites you use either personally of professionally?
With over 175 million people on Facebook, as marketers we start rubbing our little hands. And yes it’s tempting. Oh yes very tempting. I mean, if Facebook were a country if would be the sixth most populated in the world! (And we don’t need a passport or have to put up with airline security.)
But Ed has a point. He says:
People who study Internet marketing intensely as we do, use Facebook completely the wrong way. Actually let me rephrase that, we do not use it the way “real people” use it.”
I’m certainly rethinking my use of Facebook. I haven’t logged in for months, simply because it was a time hog having through sift through an Inbox full of solicitations, spam, and useless conversations to find anything of value and personal.
And although I don’t know wether I’ll be flushing friends from the bathroom of my account just yet, not because I don’t want to, but because I’m too lazy to do it myself, I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer.
Its really going to boil down to answering this question for yourself: What’s my purpose for using it?
I’d love to hear from you. Especially those using Facebook both professionally and personally.
Will you be flushing your friends? How do you use Facebook and what do you get out of it?
Talk soon.
It’s very true that people view the whole adding friends the wrong way. I once heard the awesome Lynn Terry say something like this: “People say the money is in the list – the truth is that the key is in the relationship with your list.” That is so true- we need to help others, befriend them care about them. When we do that the law of reciprocation kicks in. Our focus should be on others no on ourselves.
Blessings,
Eren Mckay
True Eren, plus it just makes for a better and funner experience.
I would be interested to know how Mr. Dales experiment pans out. But I hope he had backups of everyone’s email so he can find them again. Perhaps this time around he will take care to imprint his ‘thought leadership’ on each added friend instead of herding them like cattle to the corral.
The value of Facebook isn’t realized in the marketing or sales department alone – it’s a hybrid of the two. You can’t directly sell your friends or they will bolt. But you also can’t sit idly by and expect friends and fans to come to you. That’s why positioning yourself as the ‘thought leader’ of your particular business is so crucial. So when your friends need something that you can supply, you’re in a pole position to meet that demand. Notice I didn’t say “the” pole position – Facebook is not the only place people spend their time. Some spend time on Successfool!
Let us know if you hear anything more from Mr. Dale on his Facebook resurrection, cool?
mongo
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