Spinning Gears :: On The Benefits of Cleaning Up Your Social Networks

spinning gears

Wait! Before you click “accept” on that random person from high school who just added you as a friend you on Facebook, read this.

I’m about to go all Doctorow in a minute, but I think there’s something seriously to be gained by maintaining a velvet rope around your social networks and communities, with a few notable exceptions. If you’re building a brand, promoting a site, or building a community for some cause or other purpose, then I completely understand making sure you have an open door policy. What I’m referring to are personal accounts on social networks for yourself and to keep you in touch with your friends, family, and loved ones.

If you have a MySpace or Facebook account, a Twitter blog or a Plurk stream, or anything similar, it would likely behoove you to do a couple of important things while you’re setting it up: pay attention to the privacy policy and any available privacy settings, and make sure you’re taking the exclusive approach from the beginning instead of the all-inclusive approach. I admit I’m saying this because I’ve learned it the hard way, but there’s some value in making a conscious decision on who to let into your personal and private communities and who to exclude. I’ll explain below the jump.

Let’s take a look at my Twitter account, for example. You can find me here at Twitter, and you’ll note that I follow tons of people. I do take care with who I follow back after they’ve followed me though – Twitter is notorious that if you follow someone of interest, other little lamprey Twitter accounts latch on to you as well. For example, follow the legendary wine critic and brand builder Gary Vaynerchuk, and you’ll likely find yourself followed by a couple of wine distributors or critics trying to build their own brands. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing – you make the call yourself whether they’re interesting or relevant to you – they’re just trying to build a name for themselves. But you’re not obligated to follow them back.

The same applies to the people you follow. For example, I follow more than a few celebrities at Twitter, and they usually do the smart thing and follow the friends they already have on the site and the people they truly find interesting; not everyone in the world who follows them. That lets them keep from getting overwhelmed by tweets, and stay focused in their updates; actually providing content people might want to read – the kind of content that got them all of those followers.

Now let’s move over to my Facebook account, which I dare not link. I signed up for Facebook – well, okay, I didn’t sign up for Facebook. I was so reluctant to sign up for Facebook that one of my friends did it for me and sent me the username and password. While I’m on that topic, did you know that it’s really easy to steal your online identity if you don’t bother to claim it? Yeah – go register at the big sites now while you still have the choice to make a name for yourself, lest someone else do it for you.

In any event, a good friend of mine signed me up for Facebook. It took me a while, but I connected to a few actual friends, filled out my profile, and then within days I was flooded by acquaintances from high school. People I hadn’t spoken to since college, and in some cases before that. Now I’m not terribly old; I’m young enough to remember these people and whether we got along in school or not. The longest I’d gone without seeing or speaking to some of these people is only about 12 years. But that’s long enough to make me wary of adding them as my “friend,” where they can stay on top of my day-to-day activities.

I was presented with a choice that I didn’t fully comprehend at the time: add one and thus open the floodgates to all of them, or keep them at arm’s length. I wound up choosing the former; and the requests came fast and furious after that. I was in a position where if I added one old friend that I hadn’t spoken to in 10 years, why not another? And another? Then came the coworkers – I already felt out of control of my own social network, so I let them in too.

The result was a Facebook page that’s so cluttered with old high-school friends and coworkers that I barely really know that I don’t use it. A useful tool I could have used to stay in touch with my actual friends who connected with me is now all but unusable because I don’t really care for my old high school friends to know whether I’m frustrated with my job, and I can’t say that I’m frustrated with my job in front of my coworkers. As long as they’re listed as friends, no privacy settings will save me from the office gossip that would ensue.

Thus I learned the primary rule of social networking: control your networks, and you can control your message. If you want to be yourself-really, truly, yourself-you need to make sure you hand pick every person in your network. They need to be the people you can really show yourself to, in all of your personal tastes and eccentricities. If you poison that network with one person you need to put on a different mask around, you’ve killed that network’s usefulness to you.

When I started my personal blog, I realized there were some things I wanted to talk about only in the privacy of trusted company, so I headed over to Livejournal and created a blog there too, where I could screen, filter, and mask posts to friends-only. Now if only I had done the same with my social networks!

That leads into the flip side of this coin. All of this advice is well and good if you’re starting a network or signing up for an account somewhere for the first time. But if you’re in my situation with Facebook for example, or if your Twitter followers have gotten out of control, it might be time to do the deed and pare them back.

You don’t have to be in the same situation as I am – you may want to pare them back because a friend of a friend just irritates the hell out of you and never seems to say anything worth your time or worse is completely inflammatory, maybe you have a political disagreement with an online “friend” and it’s so fundamental that you just don’t want to hear or read what they say. Maybe you just can’t be yourself around them. Regardless of the reason, it’s time to pull the plug on them.

Most services, including Facebook and Twitter, don’t notify people when you stop following them and when you drop them as friends. The goal is to give people the flexibility to customize their lists and remove people without having to deal with drama that may ensue from the inevitable “Why did you stop following me?!” Some services don’t, although most of them are coming around. To that end, it’s all about sucking it up, dealing with whatever drama may ensue, and clicking the button to remove them from your friends’ list.

I’m not saying there won’t be drama, there probably will be, especially if it’s a tightly knit community and you want to stay in touch with some elements but not others – like my problem with my high school friends; if I want to stay in touch with some of them but ditch others, I’m going to have to deal with some questions. If I want to ditch all of my coworkers and redirect them to my LinkedIn profile, I’ll have to hear about it at work.

But think to yourself – isn’t that worth it to create and really own online communities where you feel like you can be yourself, and not the person you are at work, or the person you were at the high school reunion? You get to shape your message, you get to shape your tone and what you say. Additionally, you open up your social networks to new people you want to interact with, in the way you want to interact with them. By pushing your coworkers to LinkedIn instead of Facebook, you allow yourself to invite more real friends to see your Facebook profile and thus your actual thoughts and feelings; and by keeping your Twitter feed trimmed to people you’re actually interested in, you allow yourself the ability to read what they say and respond to them directly – encouraging them to engage you, and opening up friendships you may not have known you could have (this has happened to me on Twitter very recently, I can attest to it).

To me, that’s precious- worth dealing with a few days of drama from anyone who may feel jilted. And with that, I think I’ve worked up the confidence to do some spring cleaning of my own. Nothing personal!

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