Facebook says that the average user has 130 friends but I know people who have hundreds, even thousands of friends. 500 friends? I can’t imagine many people who have that many friends with whom they would willingly share personal updates, photos, even their full birthday. So I asked around and got some good insight into the friending and unfriending business. These findings don’t represent a large group, just my friends! 🙂
- There is a group of Facebook users who will accept friend requests from anyone and who actively try to expand their friend network.
- There is another group that views Facebook as a place where they can communicate freely so they only connect with true friends. For these folks, Facebook is a place for personal communications, often about self, family, kids, friends.
- There was a general consensus that the new Facebook homepage, which splits updates between News Feed and View Live Feed, makes it harder to see updates from your entire network of friends, which makes it more challenging to have a large network.
- Many people have been cleaning up their lists on Facebook, Twitter, and other social network recently. They’re actively unfriending people so they can manage the communications and flood of updates.
- Even if a person has a large network on a platform like Facebook, they are more than likely only interacting with a small subset of friends. Indeed, the Facebook sociologist says that no matter how large their friend network, Facebook users tend to “comment on stuff from only about 5-10% of their Facebook friends.”
So just how does one end up on an unfriend list?
- If you never respond to direct messages.
- If you never update your status.
- If your relationship with a person is tenuous at best.
BTW, if you unfriend someone on Facebook, the person does not receive a notification, but they can no longer look at your profile and they can’t request to get connected again. If you unfollow someone on Twitter, they don’t receive a notification and chances are, they won’t notice since many people have so many followers and people they are following. It is quite another thing, however, to block someone on Twitter; if you block someone, they can’t follow you.
As for me, on Twitter, I let most people follow me on Twitter and I follow nearly 700 people back. On Facebook, however, I only accept friend requests from people I know, people I would gladly have lunch with, and with whom I don’t mind sharing information about my son. So while I’m connected to nearly a thousand people on Twitter, I only have 170 people in my Facebook network.
How about you? How large is your social network on the different platforms? What criteria do you use to assess friend requests? Are you doing any unfriending lately?
