Facebook Friends List

Most of us have Facebook profiles and every day we see tones of articles on why Facebook is a big blessing to mankind. One of the most obvious measures of popularity has become the number of friends that you have on Facebook. And if you are a business who believes in social media marketing, then you measure it by the number of page likes that you get.

Facebook Friends List

Well, not quite!  Let me demonstrate why you should avoid excessive Facebook usage and stop measuring popularity by the length of your friends list or the number of your page likes.

A large number of Facebook friends may not be quite helpful in measuring your popularity – in fact it can do more harm than good. Often quantity is not a true indicator of quality and in case of individuals, it has been proven that you cannot maintain meaningful relationships with more than a certain number of individuals and once you friends list cross 100s then you are really not doing justice to either yourselves or your friends.  This is a compelling reason why you should be careful while adding friends as well as accepting friend requests. One effective way to do this is to avoid being of Facebook all the time. After all, when you befriend several friends, with the sole aim of increasing your friends list, somewhere along the line you are bound to make the mistake of accepting the friend request of a total stranger with malicious intents.  The problems this can cause range from the less serious one of a stranger reading about your personal matters to the more grave one of losing your private information to spammers.

Now, if you are a business, then again a Facebook like is only a first step towards converting visitor interest into actual dollar revenues. And, unless the likes are genuine, more likely than not, you are going to expose your page to spam messages than use it as a genuine platform for interaction with visitors who actually like your product or service.  Often businesses would do well not to focus their energies on Facebook, and rather aim to improve more concrete aspects of customer service such as prompt order management, good product quality, on time customer service, a live help line and so on.

The hype surrounding Facebook is just that – hype. There is not much meat to the argument that Facebook is an integral part of your marketing strategy. You can include Facebook as one of your marketing elements however you are not missing out on much if you completely avoid it also. All you need is to focus on the more important aspects of business and customer management highlighted earlier. After all, one customer who is loyal and spends $1000 dollars on your products over the course of a year, is much more worth your attention than trying to acquire 100 customers who would spend $10 per year on your products. The former would act as your evangelist, by spreading the news about how good your products are and how well you treat customers. And it is always more trustworthy when your customer is speaking about you than when you blow your own trumpet through Facebook. So, avoid spending time and energy on Facebook and instead focus on wowing the customer and getting him to provide you with referrals and testimonials. This strategy is more likely to bring in more customers who are willing to spend the dollars rather than mindless Facebook updates.

Hence, whether you are an individual or a business it is best to avoid excessive and mindless Facebook usage.