FreshNetworks Blog

I read a good post from LouisGray about the social rules of social networks. Who do you follow and why? Who don’t you follow and why not?

The online etiquette of social networks and online communities is an interesting and emerging area, and one that tools such as OpenSocial will only influence. For instance, I have profiles on a range of sites, from LinkedIn and Facebook, to Twitter and FriendFeed, to niche industry social networks and ones of people with similar interests to me. I often have different friends on each of these and in fact probably use each one for very different reasons.

These reasons are worth investigating. Some people choose to become friends with only their close circle of real-world friends, or conversely may accept every friend request they get. As LouisGray points out:

Suddenly, the issue of friending became less about wanting to actually follow real friends, or peers, and instead, became an arms race - to get the most followers, to follow the most people, to rise up a leaderboard, or feel some kind of achievement because you could claim a friend as a household name.

So whether you have your close friends, your wider friendship group, or as many friends as you can lay your hands on, you have a set of social media manners that define who you invite when.

Some people talk about having social network friends. I think this is a misnomer - you don’t have social network friends, but rather have Facebook friends, LinkedIn friends, Twitter friends and so forth. Not everybody I follow on Twitter are friends on LinkedIn, and I probably wouldn’t one some LinkedIn connections to follow me on Facebook.

Social media manners are actually quite advanced and getting more so as people adopt more networks and communities. I have decided that I want to use Facebook for certain purposes and so invite appropriate people; LinkedIn I’ve decided is for other purposes and so invite a different mix of people. The distinction isn’t clear-cut with a lot of overlap, so these friendship groups become blurred.

I would imagine that everybody has slightly different groups of friends on each different social network or online community they are a member of. I would also expect that their is blurring between them. Social networks are developing, rather than having distinct and distinguishing brand identities and so mean different things to different people. This means that the policy I have for using LinkedIn and making friends there is probably different to the one everybody else has.

This is where the real blurring is. Social networks are centred on me and so I decide how and why I use it. I develop my own social media manners and then develop and test these. The world of social media is changing and developing all the time, and we are helping to shape this by the mere fact of using them.

Some more reading

• You Are Not My Friend
• Choose Wisely: Scrutinizing Your Social Network Connections
• Facebook Facelift Targets Aging Users and New Competitors
• Experiments and Lessons Learned in Social Media - Part III
• The Intangible Risk and Opportunity: Your Network
• What are your tips for using your social networking profile for professional work?
• What are your tips for using your social networking profile for professional work?