I tend to live pretty publicly on various social media services. It’s important for me to be on top of new web product trends because in my day job as a startup warrior, it’s beneficial to spot and understand web tools that can help grow a business and connect with customers. I frequently get asked about get put in a position where I have to defend Twitter and other web services from my friends who don’t get it. Twitter seems to catch the most flak and I think it’s still very much misunderstood even by people who use it. I hear a abundance of statements like “I don’t understand twitter” or “twitter is stupid.” I thought I’d use this as the basis of a post and expand it to cover Facebook and similar services that utilize the concept of a chronological activity stream.
If the above statements are ones that you have said or thought, chances are, your’re doing it wrong. Streams are a consumption tool that sites employ to streamline content from different sources into a central repository where it can be read and acted upon. That much, I think everyone understands. What people fail to consider is their own consumption bandwidth. Bandwidth here meaning, the time you have available to read and follow up on your stream activity (or the time you WANT to spend doing these activities). I’ve noticed that social media detractors are always the ones who are following too many people or have too many friends on Facebook. All these people are contributing information to their streams and they are seeing a cacophony of updates every time they login. It’s just not possible for them to extract anything meaningful from all the voices.
PROTIP: The less people you follow/friend the more meaningful your social streams become.
This is an excercise in self discipline. Especially with Facebook. The prospect of denying a friend request or not following back someone on Twitter is tough for people. They don’t want to appear rude for one, but most often, they don’t associate the cost of that friend/follow add in terms of their bandwidth. There is a certain number of people, or range of people, whose information updates you can follow and act upon based upon the amount of time you have in your day to spend on social media services. Follow/friend above that range and you will find yourself struggling to stay up on your streams and read the content that is being put forth by your friends or people you follow. (you’ll miss the good nugets of information). Continue on this path and you will eventually only be able to catch a small portion of it, and then a smaller portion still. Eventually it gets to the point where your saying “twitter is stupid.”
You’re stupid.
Before RSS readers (the stream pioneers) people had to go to each site individually to get their news. Bookmarks were required so you could remember where you needed to go to catch everything. RSS readers changed all that and took the content from different sites and presented it in a central location so your time could be spent reading instead of navigating. Twitter is an updated version of this, with the added benefit of being able to broadcast your own content if you need to. (it’s also a challenge to SMS because of @reply messaging, but I wont go into that in this post)
Just as you can’t possibly read every news article or RSS feed out there, it makes no sense to follow everyone. Even if they followed you first. Being selective is the key to getting the most out of social media. Only follow what you are really committed to reading everyday (or each week). Anything more than this is just getting in the way of you getting to the content you want.
As a personal rule I try to keep the number of people I follow on Twitter around 50. That seems to be the limit of my daily bandwidth. From those 50 accounts and their days worth of updates I am able to read and engage with 20-30 articles per day or 1-2 hours worth of reading. Some days those accounts produce more (i.e. tech industry events like CES and SXSW produce a deluge of articles), some days it’s much less and I am happy to clear the list and do other things.
With Facebook, the number seems to be about 500 friends. I’m not quite there yet (appx 415 friends) but I’m starting to sense that my stream is becoming unruly. Of late, I’ve been selective of my friend adds and even more selective of the pages I “like” for those tend to be loose clicks with heavy consequences in terms of stream clutter. Don’t be afraid to unlike something you don’t care for anymore or that has lost it’s comedic edge or social relevance.
But “how do I get a lot of followers?” you might ask…
You get a lot of followers by putting out content that people want to read, share, and engage with. It takes time to build up an audience online just like it takes time for a band to build up a local following. You have to keep putting out good stuff and start two-way (@reply) dialog with the limited, but extremely relevant, people you do follow. Keep this up and before long they will follow you back and begin retweeting your stuff out to their followers.
Whoever started this “follow back” trend should be flayed by Roose Bolton. This notion of guilting people to follow you back is a horrible, experience-damaging concept. Unfortunately, uneducated users are enamored by the propects of having many, many followers and will make good on the proposition to fallow back much to their eventual frustration later. The truth is, a follower who is simply in it for the follow back isn’t someone who cares about what you say or what you post. Nor do you care about what they post. So why follow each other? To look cool because you have a lot of followers? Dumb. You know what’s cool?.. having a high, positive, ratio of followers to following.
Simply put, you should strive to have the number of people who follow you be much higher than the number of people you follow. By a factor of 2 to 1, 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 for starters… Look at the Twitter account of any good content producers out there:
@techcrunch 1.97million followers / 800 following = 2462 to 1 ratio
@nasa 1.76million followers / 170 following = 10,352 to 1 ratio
@cinemasecre 37,000 followers / 24 following = 1542 to 1 ratio
@msuster 58,562 / 857 = 68 to 1 ratio
Obviously, these examples (as well as celebrities figures) are extremophiles being that they have very high positive ratios but no one can deny it’s cool to have audiences that want to follow you for reasons other than the follow back.
@angrymetalguy has a ratio of 4.9 while following 250 people.
@fakegrimlock has a ratio of 3.1 while following 2100 people.
In the case of @fakegrimlock, he is following a higher number of people than most can handle, but then again, he is a giant dinosaur robot and a legend of the internet so he can do it. However, the bandwidth rule applies, there is still a point at which it will be to cacophonous for him and content from Optimus Prime and the Autobots will not get through the clutter.
PROTIPS
1. Put some thought into the cost of following back. Do you really care what that person or organization tweets? Is it preventing you from noticing better content?
2. If you see a so called “social media expert” and they have thousands of followers but had to follow that many people or more to get there, do not follow this person, they have nothing good to say. If they did, they’d have a positive ratio of followers to following.
3. Look at your following list from time to time and see if you still care to follow some of those accounts. When I approach 60 following, I know I need to drop ~10 or commit more time to reading. Unfollowing is a lot easier than de-friending so utilize it. Check for overlaps in your content, you may be following too many similar news organizations. Do you need to follow Blabbermouth, MetalAssault AND MetalSucks? or would one of them be sufficient to keep you in the loop?
Back to Facebook…
As I alluded to above, de-friending is a tougher prospect than unfollowing. I can’t confirm this is true or not (probably not) but for whatever the reason, we feel like the other person will find out that you’ve de-friended them. I know I do, so that’s why I’m trying not to reach the point where my stream gets too cluttered for meaningful usage. Better to avoid it than have to deal with it later. (Facebook makes it possible to subscribe to someone who makes their updates publically, so even though you defriend they can still see your public updates and may not know you’ve defriended.)
For many people, especially early Facebook users, the reality is that over time they have built up thousands of friends. Each new stage of life introduces more people into your world and gives you new potential Facebook friends. The problem is, unlike your old real-life friends, your Facebook friends don’t really fade away leaving room for new ones. They stay there and take up space, so to speak…
This is a major problem that Facebook is addressing and probably will have to commit major resources to in the future. (I predict that they will have to start educating people on the cost of each friend, though do so in an easy to grasp way and doesn’t sound mean). We have already seen them try to alleviate the problem by allowing you to put together “lists” to help filter the streams so you dont have to see everyone at once. This may help but educating users is ultimately going to be the way to combat this problem. To put this in perspective, try to figure out what your Facebook friend count will be 20 years from now based on how many friends you’ve acquired up until now and how many years you’ve been using it…. Answer: A shit-ton. (Yes I know FB currently caps at 5000 but here’s the thing, there’s pressure on FB to remove the limit and more importantly, anything over 3000 IS a shit-ton.)
This is new territory for the web. The very things that social media companies pride themselves on, namely, allowing you to connect and share with people and companies easily, is the very thing that causes them to loose value as they mature.
A market opportunity has arisen for companies that want to stress limited connection networks. Path.com is the example that comes to mind. It’s like Facebook except it stresses connecting only with family and very close friends. I think there is something to this concept, perhaps they’ve found the achilles heel of Facebook. Personally, I’d like to see Facebook figure out a solution so that friend management becomes a commonly practiced part of the service. (Perhaps from time to time you are prompted to categorize a “friend” as Family, Close-friend, friend, or acquaintance and that would dictate how much content you receive from them) I dont think they can count on people being diligent enough to do this on their own so they will have to use some sort of push mechanism. They’d better do it fast too because as Michael Arrington points out, it’s getting to this point.
Two things I would like to see:
1. A 200 max cap on the amount of people you can follow on twitter. (force people to be good stream managers… like a good sports GM who has to work within player number limits and budget constraints. Here, number limit is 200 and time is the thing we are budgeting for.)
2. Have an “Active Friends” on Facebook category and an “Inactive Friends”. Only the day to day updates of your Active Friends would be pushed to your incoming feed. Cap the Active friends limit at 1000. If you reach the active friend limit you have to do some trades amongst your two lists. (Though you would have viewing access to non-active friends)
It would seem harsh, but in the long run it will keep Facebook usable as internet generations age.
Battle on.
