Social Networking - Making FaceBook Friends

By Paul Barrs


OK, as I write this, I won’t pretend to be some huge FaceBook guru guy with squillions of friends, no, I’m just some ordinary guy whose actually only been on FaceBook for a few months – BUT…

Already I’ve found this huge problem already, one which was highlighted to me the other day by my newest ‘friend’.

Let me explain…

Over the past week I noticed that FaceBook was telling me that certain other people and I shared a dozen or so ‘mutual friends’. It recommended that I connect with them, and so I did. But being that I didn’t actually know who they were, and not being totally sure if they had an interest in the home business / net marketing industry I sent a short courtesy letter along with my friend request.

Immediately following my response I received another recommendation to befriend yet another person… and so on and so on.

Within two days I found that my recommendations were growing, so I kept using the same process – sending a message along with my friend request.

This was easy to do, because once I drafted the introduction letter (3 very short paragraphs) I saved it into a text file on my desktop, and simply copied and pasted it into the welcome message and added in their name. Nice.

Initially I though nothing more of it than “common courtesy”, but when I received an eMail the other day from ‘new friend’ that I mentioned earlier and she said, “Thanks for adding me to your FaceBook friends. I also appreciate you sending me a personal note with your request!! I can't tell you how many I get without it….” I also realized that it was unique.

Ding! And there’s a key!!

If you’re a member of FaceBook, you like most others probably tend to notice that a great bunch of people just seem to link to pages they’re working on, or new websites they’ve put up… and while that OK (I do it myself also), it’s not *all* that you should be doing. It’s also not all you *could* be doing –

Let’s Break it down; Social Networking – Making FaceBook Friends.

Part one, ‘Social Networking’, the online dictionary at dictionary.com explains this as, “the use of a website to connect with people who share personal or professional interests….” I like this because it suggests connecting with others.

People who do nothing more than post pages via automated website DO NOT connect.

Now, if I take a little license we find that ‘Making Friends’… means ‘creating, making, developing rapport with “a person attached to [you] by feelings of … personal regard.”

There fore we have “Using a website (FaceBook) to connect and share with people information and interests that create and develop mutual feelings of personal regard.”

NONE of this can be achieved only by auto-linking. Of course, we all get caught up in the thrill of having ‘hundreds of friends’ and it makes us ‘feel good’ so we don’t really care who does or doesn’t sign on, right?

But let me ask you this… even though you cannot possibly do this with all of your friends, how often do you jump onto someone else’s “wall” and post a note for them? Do you also have your eMail set up to notify you when someone makes a comment that you’ve already commented on, or when someone posts on *your* wall?

Do you remember how good it made you feel when you were new and someone did this for you? These feeling of self fulfillment don’t fade away just because we’ve now got thousands of “friends”. The problem is that *most* of those friends are only ASKING things, not GIVING.

And so to wrap up, keep this in mind… some of these things I’ve spoken about today can be automated, and that’s fine – but not all of them should. The most important thing is to remember to build, to give, to share… in essence to “make” friends not just “take”.