The Heritage Foundation's Director of Online Strategy, Robert Bluey, published a piece a few weeks ago calling for a Facebook Diet of sorts. Bluey cites a recent tweet from David All in which All claimed he was "going on a Facebook Friend diet for 2010" with a goal of being "under 1,500 by July 4th."
I share Bluey and All's concern and desire to make their Facebook networks more personal and to rid their Facebook news feeds of Blingee Book and Mafia Wars. After all, the social network was built be a place where you could connect with your "friends". But with all due respect to these two online strategists far more brilliant than me, I would argue that eliminating your current Facebook friends or refusing to accept friend requests that come in the future is not the best solution to this problem.
In his blog post, Bluey says that his wife will ask "why a total stranger is remarking about a personal item" such as a picture of their son. A good question indeed. I ran into similar annoyances when friends of my parents started joining Facebook 3-4 years after I had been on the
network. My parents and their friends suddenly had access to everything I was doing with my life online, and people who I had not seen in a decade were suddenly giving me life advice via my Facebook status. Talk about obnoxious. But un-friending these people or not accepting their friend requests was not the answer. There were times when I had information that I wanted to share with these people, whether it was news of my engagement, wedding plans, or career moves I was making. If I had made the decision to deny their friend requests or un-friend them, I would have lost the ability to communicate with them via Facebook.
Over the past week, I have received an average of 6 friend requests per day. Almost all of these people I have never heard of before, but upon inspecting our "mutual friends" it is clear that these people want to connect with me professionally (or, perhaps more likely, simply increase their Facebook friend count for reasons beyond my understanding). While I do not want to give these people access to everything I post on Facebook (especially personal status updates), why would I turn down someone who has initiated a relationship that could be beneficial to me professionally? More than 15% of the traffic to my blog comes directly from Facebook, and increasing my footprint on Facebook will allow me to drive more traffic to that content and make connections that could be mutually beneficial to me and my "friends" in the future.
So how can I keep these two worlds of Facebook "friends" separate? The rarely-talked-about, yet incredibly effective Facebook Lists tool.
Every time I receive a friend request on Facebook from someone I do not recognize, I check to see what friends I have in common with the requester ("mutual friends"). 99 times out of 100, the "mutual friends" will be politicians, journalists and other "professional" connections I have made on Facebook. By simply clicking the "Add to List" drop down menu underneath the name of the friend requester, I can choose what previously created list I want to add this new friend to. If they are someone I think will be interested in the political content I post to Facebook, I add them to my "Professional" list. If the person is someone I know in the offline world that has no interest in politics, I place them in the "Personal" list.
Once these lists are set up, I can determine which lists see which status updates and links I post to Facebook. For example, this blog post would not interest my personal friends on Facebook, but if I wanted to drive my professional network on Facebook to this post, I could because I have a created a list of my professional friends. By clicking the drop-down menu to the left of the "Share" button, I can manually select exactly who I want to see my Facebook status update or link.
In this example, I want my entire professional list to see my link, so I select "Professional" and save my setting. Once I click "Share" only my professional contacts will be able to see my link, sparing my personal friends from my political ramblings.
Facebook Lists can also be incredibly effective for political campaigns at the local and congressional level. If a candidate is using a Facebook profile instead of a Facebook page, they have the ability to segment their friends into many different messaging niches. Let's say Candidate X for State House posts a Facebook status update regarding their position on property taxes. If 35 people "like" that Facebook status, Candidate X can be relatively certain that those 35 people agree with their stance on that issue. If property taxes are an important issue to Candidate X's campaign, why not segment those 35 people into a separate Facebook List and target future messages regarding property taxes (especially fundraising pleas) to those people?
This principle of segmenting your message is a timeless one that has been made simple in other online mediums such as e-mail. But it admittedly requires much more effort on Facebook.
Facebook has evolved a great deal since its launch six years ago, and those of us that have been a member of the network for a number of years have seen our network of friends evolve with it. For those of us who continue to use Facebook and other forms of social media to promote our candidates and causes, we will always be confronted with the challenge of keeping our personal and professional lives separate online. This alternative Facebook Friend Diet, though tedious, has immensely helped me segment my Facebook network instead of purge it. I hope it will do the same for you.
