Myspace and Facebook?
In a discussion on www.betternetworker.com, the question was asked “What is the maximum number of friend requests you can make per day on Myspace and Facebook???”
Being trained on “relationship marketing” for some time now, one of the replies there “Best advice I can give is to just use develop the habit of adding 10-20 a day. ” Prompted a question for me -
I guess I still just don’t get this. Why would you want to have so many friends when you can’t follow that many as is. Sure, you’re adding them for them to follow you but, how do you start a conversation with someone when there are just so many someone’s, you can figure out who’s who and what’s what. Like I said, I guess I just don’t get this.Karen Umstattd
Well, this definitely prompted further discussion and debate on this subject but it helps me to #1 See why I got away from some of these networks and #2 Why I’ve become selective as to who I choose to connect with now.
One person went on to write about how he has several accounts with several networks because of continually being deleted. Well, I wonder why? And someone else replied “It’s all about the numbers”.
Is it really all about the numbers, or is it about building quality, trusting relationships with people that will follow you where ever you go?
In this day and age, there is so much talk and training on the subject of promoting “You,Inc” and sure, it took me a bit to get that too but once I did, and the light bulb went off, my business skyrocketed and the referrals came pouring in!
Wouldn’t just love for people who know you to highly recommend you to others as a “professional” in your field? How does one get these kinds of referrals? By promoting “You,Inc”.
How do I promote my “You,Inc” business these days? By networking on quality networks with quality people who have quality conversations, and by giving everyone an opportunity to meet me on a personal level by sending them to my youtube account at www.KarenUmstattd.com
Speaking of recommending a professional, in this conversation there was a post made by someone whom I would be very comfortable with recommending as I’ve seen his networking and have always appreciated the professionalism in his word. Mark posted a reponse to this conversation that I found very helpful that I will post here as well
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Remember that MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter were created for social networking not advertising. Therefore, the more one uses the site for advertising, the higher the chance your page will be deleted.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. I never used a friend-adder program on MySpace (all the friends I had were from personal requests), I established a MySpace account more for personal connections than business, and I did not blast bulletins or blog posts. Nonetheless, my account was deleted by MySpace. My understanding is that all it takes is a complaint from another member (a competitor perhaps) and an $8-an-hour MySpace employee who decides he or she should delete the account.
Given that there are exceptions to the general rule, I still believe it’s important to respect the purpose of the site and its Terms of Use.
Regarding Twitter, I understand that if you follow many more people than follow you that they flag your account as a being a possible spammer. The logic, as others have mentioned in this thread, is that you cannot possibly follow that many people and why would you? Are you genuinely interested in following 459 people when 23 are following you? Doubtful. Thus, Twitter assumes that you are probably following so many people in an attempt to get them to follow you–and they are right!
This situation is analogous to the old practice of stuffing a web page full of high-interest keywords in an attempt to move your page up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Google and others quickly caught on to the strategy and began to penalize sites that employed the technique. As with social networking sites, if we do something that interferes with their quality of their product, companies are going to attack back hard and fast. Heck, if I owned a social networking site or search engine, I would do the exact same thing.
In the long run the best strategy is to align your business objectives with the purpose and functioning of the site. When building web sites or blogs this means providing high-quality content which will naturally include keywords. For social networking sites, build your connections (friends, followers, etc.) naturally, which means do not follow or befriend someone simply to increase your numbers but rather because you think they might be a good person with whom to network (or because they are already a true friend of yours).
All the Best,
Mark
“Mark D Worthen PsyD publishes the popular Internet & Network Marketing Blog.”
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