I’m not gonna lie, I used to be the guy who had hundreds and hundreds of Facebook friends. I used to think that actually meant something.
Right now I have 116 friends on there. These are strong connections. People I’ve actually met, people I’ve known for years, people I’ve done crazy things with, or people that I’ve talked to about doing work for.
One thing I hate is letting people I don’t know, know every single detail about my life. I don’t want to be “friends” with 100 strangers who live near me and then post how I’m gonna be out of town for a week. That’s like a free invite to come break into my house because they know it’s empty. And they can probably figure out where I live from my previous posts and photos.
But the main reason I hate having so many online friends is because it’s way too time consuming to keep up with all of them! Sure, I can hide people on Facebook, and I do that to almost everyone, but you can’t do that on the other social networks.
On my main Twitter account, I only follow 26 people. And 4 of those are my other accounts. On my personal Instagram account, I only follow 102 people, and 3 of those are my other accounts.
What I’m getting at is, the more people you follow, the more time you have to spend keeping up with all of them. If I don’t look at my Twitter account for a few days, that’s ok. It’s only going to take 5-10 minutes to go through everything I missed. Same with Facebook. Instagram takes a bit longer. If I miss one full day, it’s gonna take 20-30 minutes to look at everything I missed.
Now with that said, I’m bad at going a long time without looking at these apps. I’m always interested in what badass people are doing out in the world. What I should really be doing instead is being one of those badass people.
Can you imagine how much time some people waste though? Like a person who has 500-1000+ Facebook friends (and doesn’t hide any of them), follows 200-500+ celebrities on Twitter, who follows 500-1000+ people on Instagram, and has several other social networks. And what if they are religious about checking all of those accounts and not missing a single update? That’s a full-time job. For real! They will just coast through life, working a shitty job where they can be on their phone or a computer all day for personal use, ignoring people all day, not really enjoying vacations, never building their own business, never becoming a badass. Just watching and following other people doing what they could.
And just an FYI, my other Twitter and Instagram accounts have tons of people that I follow. I do not even look at those updates unless I’m tagged in someone’s post. I just follow all those people in hopes that they will follow back to gain a ton of awareness about my site or brand.
So the next time you say, “There is never enough time to get everything done!”, take a look at where you are spending your time. I’m sure a lot of it is spent on mindless activities like social networks. Don’t even get me started on cable tv.