Facebook is not Twitter. You shouldn’t have too many friends there.

For a long time I was thinking why Facebook is such a great tool for promoting our projects? I mean not exactly facebook’s fan pages, or external applications (such as NetworkedBlogs); but via our typical, private accounts.

It’s obvious fact, that facebook is a great tool for all kind of marketing actions. Thanks to all our friends, whole community (350 million users!), fan pages, external apps, etc our message could easily be noticed by lots of people. That’s obvious. However each of these parts of facebook have their own rules of good proceedings.

On fan pages your main goal is to achieve as many fans (or even engaged fans), as you can. When you have an external app for facebook – your main goal is to attract as many interested users, as you can. But what about our normal (private) account?

Is it so important to have lots of friends?

No, it’s not.

People (thanks to twitter) are accustomed to gaining lots of friends/users/followers. Call it as you want.

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki (he is the most famous guy, who was saying, that you should fight for having lots of followers and follow everyone, who is following you) we think that the most important thing is to have lots of friends everywhere. And that’s true in social media sites like twitter, digg, stumbleupon, etc. However it’s not true when we are talking about our private accounts on facebook.

What’s the most powerfull thing about our private accounts on facebook? That we really know all our friends. That we trust them. That it’s possible to check out all links, which have been shared by our friends.

If some of our friends want to share some link with his friends – we believe that it could be interesting. And that’s why we click on it. And that’s the power of our private accounts on facebook!

Few days ago I became a friend (facebook‘s friend) of Fabio Sasso (founder of abduzeedo). And it prompted me to think about that topic. He has 2,749 friends on facebook. Is it really possible to know all of them? Is it really possible to trust all of them? Is it really possible to have a chance to check all the links shared by these friends? I think it’s not.

One more thing (again, based on Fabio Sasso profile)… your private account is not for publish all kind of content from your blog. Your wall is not a wall of your blog(!)

And yes… I realize that this account is more like a fan page, not a private account (even short link to this profile is facebook.com/abduzeedo; not facebook.com/fabiosasso or something). However in era of facebook’s fan pages and apps like NetworkedBlogs we should simply be able to separate private accounts from non-private ones.

Based on these arguments – I can give you an advice:

your facebook friends should be your (truly) friends; or at least trust people
on your wall you should write about things, which are interesting for you; it shouldn’t be a feed of your blog

PS. I’m sorry Fabio for my negative statement. I just don’t agree with your “methodology”.

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Comments

Deborah Chamberlain
January 29, 2010, 4:54 pm

I agree with you 100% with the blabbing your statuses and personal info to everybody irrelevant in the world. This private info should be privy to actual true friends. True dat!

darrell
January 30, 2010, 11:46 am

i think the heavy amount of friends may also be from myspace culture.

arnold
January 31, 2010, 5:42 am

on your wall you should write about things, which are interesting for you; it shouldn’t be a feed of your blog

hope everyfacebook users knows this…
they just type any crazy things on the wall

Autonomy
January 31, 2010, 6:00 am

I totally agree. I think people really miss the point of Facebook when they try to up their friend count and flood themselves with irrelevant information from strangers while drowning out the happenings from those they care about. Privacy can easily become elusive.

Nils Geylen
January 31, 2010, 2:51 pm

Hey there, picked this up through the 9rules feed to say hello.

Personally, I do disagree. What about the acquisition of Friendfeed? It’s clear FB is rolling out much of its open and streamlike features already. So, to me, FB has become a feed. A place where everything aggregates. A public profile.

Twitter, on the other hand, is the place where I interact and where I know who the people I follow are. I may not personally know all of them, but I think they’re interesting enough to talk to.

To me then, Twitter remains the conversation tool, Facebook is, well just that: a face book, data billboard.

Ryan Taylor
January 31, 2010, 10:46 pm

Completely agree, users should only friend people they are actually friends with.

http://www.newsy.com/videos/too-many-friends

There is a study in this story that says the human brain can only maintain around 150 real connections. No one can really say they connect with more people than that.