BW Communities

'No, Thank You': Social Etiquette For Followers

Mala Bhargava Nov 08, 2014

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root available-locales="en_US," default-locale="en_US"><static-content language-id="en_US"><![CDATA[I often stop to feel gratified that the number of people who follow me on the social networks has grown organically and without my having done very much. I don't have the huge six digit numbers that many others boast of... Nowhere near it... But the people who are in my network are engaged and interactive giving me a chance to actually know them and exchange ideas and information. At the same time, I also have followers who annoy me intensely and whom I get rid of at the first opportunity. And here's why. You know nothing about me Many a time, it becomes quite clear that a person has no idea who I really am and has just chanced upon my name somewhere and asked to join my network only to increase his or her numbers. The last thing I want to be is a statistic on someone's list. I need a connection, a common ground, something to base interaction, not a mutual addition to the overall follower number. On networks such as Twitter and Facebook, additional people just means additional noise. Since I'd like to make these networks useful, that's just a nuisance. I know nothing about you If a person hasn't populated his or her profile with anything, there's little reason to accept an invitation or follow back. It's common enough on all the networks. On Twitter, I find that a person has nothing to say about his own interests and background. On LinkedIn, an unpopulated profile is even more frustrating and surprising. "Head of Self Employed" or some equivalent of that tells me nothing and gives me no reason at all to accept an invitation to connect. It also tells me that the person whose account the invitation is coming from isn't able to confidently define herself, reducing my confidence in the possibility of getting anything meaningful or useful out of future interactions. You just want to sell On the other hand are connections where people immediately get down to pushing something at you a mere five seconds after you let them into your network. That could be a product, a cause, a request for a job, or just throwing content at you imagining that you have been waiting to read something from someone you have nothing to do with. On Twitter, it's called spam. On LinkedIn, just a step away and particularly annoying. Social networks are social for a reason. You connect to engage not to say ah, I got you, now can you do this for me? Meaningless interactions The number of networks one has to keep up with is getting daunting. Even if you can see that there's much use to be got out of your communities online, keeping up is difficult because all this networking is in addition to whatever else you do offline. In such circumstances, one welcomes specific and meaningful interaction rather than unnecessary exchanges like "Look forward to interacting with you" or "Nice to know you" and then follow that up by disappearing. Looking at my connections, I find that those who send these messages are actually the ones who interact the least. Ironic and just adding to the clutter. Don't overdo it Just saying something for the sake of saying something makes it easy to spot a person who really has nothing to say! Take all those people fill your timeline with quotations from everywhere. This may help them complete their quota of tweets for the day, but really if you wanted to read quotations you can easily get to a quotation encyclopedia. There is no shortage of quotation collections on the internet. Why would you follow back someone just to get out of context untimely quotations all of the time? There are many other ways of cluttering someone's timeline, such as by responding to everything he or she says without actually taking the conversation anywhere. This too is frustrating and time wasting. One good way of steering away from noise and making connections meaningful and specific instead would be to mentally draw a parallel with interaction offline. How likely are you to go up to someone and spout quotations from one minute to the next? How would it look if you went up to someone and just said hello, I want a job? And do you really want to go up to someone and say I'm talking to you because I have a certain quota of people who  I need to talk to today! Use that yardstick and move towards engagement that is useful to you, your connection, and the network.   Mala(at)pobox(dot)com, (at)malabhargava on Twitter

Mala Bhargava

BW Reporters Mala Bhargava has been writing on technology well before the advent of internet in Indians and before CDs made their way into computers. Mala writes on technology, social media, startups and fitness. A trained psychologist, she claims that her understanding of psychology helps her understand the human side of technology.