The average Facebook user in the United States has 229 friends, initiating 3 friend requests every month and accepting 4. The Pew Internet & American Life Project indicates your age says a lot about your friends.
A Generation Xer, my friends today number 334.
That number is decreasing every day.
Think about your high school friends
Whatever your reason for reciprocally friending someone in the past, people change and with EdgeRank partially to blame, if you’re not looking at someone’s updates any more, why do you remain friends?
The best example is high school. Who’s not friends with their entire high school graduating class? I was the first on the site and everyone else followed; and when our physical reunions were scheduled, we already knew everything about each other. But aside from the annual birthday greeting and the sporadic message to say hi, why do we remain friends? It’s not like we’re liking, commenting, and sharing each other’s updates on a daily basis.
Now that my classmates are in a shared Facebook group, it doesn’t make sense to remain inactive friends since we can write announcements and share pictures there.
The neat aspect about Facebook groups is everyone can choose to be notified of new activity. When our classmate Monica died from a sudden illness a few months ago, the group was the best way to disseminate the information and tell everyone where and how to attend the wake.
With our 20th reunion next year, I’m confident the group will be used more frequently and more productively than writing on walls.
Subscribe to your friends and use interest lists
Aware that some of my friends, especially the open networkers with thousands of friends already, turned on their subscribe button, I am now subscribing to their public updates. I am also curating interest lists — and this is where Facebook is really shining for me.
One of my interest lists comprises 79 people (and climbing) in the social media marketing industry.
These are a mix of people I’ve unfriended and other colleagues I respect — and they all allow me to subscribe to them. Instead of clicking their Subscribe buttons though, I added them to an interest list. Go on and take a look. You can subscribe to my list of social voices and view digests in your news feed.
Equate your pointless friends to clutter
Whether you do as I do or not, please heed the tongue-in-cheek advice of Sam Biddle who wants you to question why Tom, Dick, and Harry are your Facebook friends. He suggests you unfriend your friends because holding onto them is akin to holding onto clutter in your home.
1. Have you ever met this person?
If not, you can probably delete —- unless it’s some foreign relative, a telecommuting coworker, or something similarly practical. Otherwise, scrap.2. Have you seen or spoken to this person recently?
The HEY WE JUST MET LET’S BE FRIENDS instinct runs strong and deep throughout the internet —- it’s customary among many circles to friend someone you’ve met the next day, or sometimes even that very night. But why? If it’s a friend of a friend of a friend, or a date who went nowhere, you’ll probably never see them again. And if you’ll probably never see them again, why should they be on any list at all? Dump ‘em.3. Have you had sex with this person?
You might again someday. Do not unfriend.4. Do you hope to someday have sex with this person?
Keep ‘em. You never know.5. Are they so bad they’re actually good?
Some faux friends are so idiotic or over the top that even if they make a mockery of our notion of friendship, they’re worth keeping around for other reasons. Like your cousin’s friend Wayne, so dumb he can’t stop posting pictures of his lawn and links to Taco Bell tweets. He’s fascinating in his own way. Study him.
If you’re not emailing or calling that Facebook friend, why are you friends?
As one of my friends wrote on his wall about a similar unfriending process he undertook, “When you eat dinner at my family’s house, I think that makes you a friend.”
About Ari Herzog
I’m a big fan of Facebook’s “unsubscribe” functionality. That way I can ignore my crazy aunts’ recitation of Fox News rhetoric, but still maintain a friendly connection where they can contact me via direct message, and comment on pictures of my kids.
In fact, I think “unsubscribe” addresses all of your reasons for unfriending while still leaving lines of communication open. From a professional standpoint, it’s always beneficial to have a large list of casual friends who you know how to reach if the reason arises.
You could try to direct message those professional contacts you “subscribe” to, but without the “friend” relationship, your message is likely to wind up in their neglected “other” folder without their knowledge.
To me, that is where a site such as LinkedIn is beneficial for the casual friends. But everyone is different. Also, if you remain friends with so many people who you have that existing relationship with, and if they’re connected to the folks you’re unfriending, you’re not losing anyone.
Man thanks for writing this. I’m the guy that basically has abandoned facebook because I don’t really know what to do with all these old “friends” who I feel like I used to know in a former life.
I don’t care about the high school crowd and their non-stop updates so I just stay away.
Thing is I’m on google plus now and I don’t miss facebook.
How do you decide which platform to focus on?
Whatever the reason, sometimes you just need to unfriend someone. It’s easier than it seems.
While I agree that subscriptions, interest lists, and groups offer new ways of managing connections on Facebook, I would think long and hard before dumping anyone I know and with whom you have an amicable–if seemingly silent–relationship. I consider my social media goals before following anyone’s advice to “Err on the antisocial side.”
As a “Younger boomer” who has always been highly selective of those I friend on Facebook, I have a different perspective. I have 90 friends. In most cases, I never speak with them on the phone. We don’t email. We communicate on Facebook exclusively. Some of these “friends” are folks with whom I have shared only a brief connection. However, I have learned that even these silent friends can be interested followers of my endeavors. Every now and then I run into one or another of these acquaintances, and I am amazed how often I hear that she has tried my recipes or he is grateful for certain links I share. I used to think about paring away friendships that longer seem important, but now I know I have no way of being sure which followers I will lose.
Social media is an iceberg. We tend to focus on that tiny portion we can see and measure, but we would be wrong to assume that the giant mass is unaffected by our communications. Sure, I could unfriend those who rarely interact and place the onus on them to follow me via other networks or subscriptions, but I am not willing risk losing them.
On the other end of the spectrum, I have a son with 800+ “friends” from high school, college, and various extracurricular activities. He goes through the list from time to time shedding those whom he cannot place or with whom he no longer feels affinity, but I would never recommend a massive dump. He’s building a platform.
Well, FB is a bit weird site because of the numerous invitations from completely unknown people… I could understand such phenomena on professional networking sites, when an invite from an unknown person may actually get us closer to making business together, or at least to get to know our professional profiles. But at FB? Never confirmed that but my opinion is that most of such invites are made from fake account using non-ethical promo ways…