How Many Facebook Friend's Are Enough?

This post is in response to a discussion on JimTurners fan page, click here to view the original post How many facebook friends are enough?

Hi Jim

I would just like to add another opinion and explain a few of the reasons why someone would want a large network. Having a large friend list on its own isn't actually much use because facebook doesn’t allow you to mail more than 20 friends at a time and I guess it's clear from what others have posted it all depends what business you are in. I fully agree of the pointless nature of rushing to grow to 5000 friends just for the sake of it and without some end goal or reason for adopting this method

As a strategist I want to explore all areas without judgement to be able to asses the merits of each type of friending strategy. If you want to advise others you need to fully understand the pro's and cons and not condemn something you don't fully understand just because you haven't personally explored it. I guess with facebook this is a problem as you have to make a choice, you can’t do both, and this is all the more reason why sharing knowledge and information is important and why I think this discussion is so useful

Malcolm Gladwell in his book the tipping point said that researchers looked at many factors regarding human networks and even analysed the maximum size of tribal villages across all cultures throughout history and the number they came out with was 148. because this was the maximum number of people you could possibly maintain a relationship with. In modern times and by using technology to aid and speed communication I suspect that Mari is correct in her figure of 250 - 500 people

I myself have grown my network rapidly over the past 2 months, this is just how it happened and was due to the people I came in contact with. I think after about 400 friends I couldn't keep the same rigorous checking and personal messaging that I had until then. I was making a very targeted list with a specific objective in mind. As I grew larger my network has become infiltrated with more untargeted friends who added me just because I was quite visible in certain groups. After 700 friends I stopped adding any new ones and my friend list has grown on its own. What I have found is that the initial 400 friends have created a core of quality in my network that have attracted similar people so even though I am not targeting them they are attracted to me. Since most of the people who friend me are friends of friends and not random people who just stumbled on my profile. The people who I need to pay attention to naturally rise to the top. I just ignore all the background noise and concentrate on developing certain key relationships

The advantages of having a large network comes through the viral effects of the friend feed. If you have a product or service that you want to promote then under certain circumstances the further you can reach the better. Not everyone who uses facebook for business is looking for high end coaching clients or has a very small niche that they need to develop very personal relationships with. I think there is a very large area in between this and Macdonalds. And it is short sighted to infer that everyone who chooses to develop a large network is going to be a spammer. I also think that for many people one half of their business might need a small intimate network and the other a much larger less intimate network. Anyone who makes information products would always want to reach the widest audience possible. So I believe many people are split in their opinions because their businesses are not one dimensional and they might have different needs at different levels.

Having a large network means that if you want to launch a group on facebook and if you have targeted your friends carefully you will be able to grow your group quickly and the momentum of that growth can push your group to become viral. Take a look at the group "join the fight against cancer", it has 184,000+ members and the admin can fully control what is shown in the links, the videos and pictures, this could be used as a very powerful traffic generator and all those impressions are for free. The key is how to get your group to hit critical mass where it just grows on its own. Since facebook raised the limit from 1200 to 5000 this gives most group admins a lot of scope for developing a relationship with a large number of people. As long as you give valuable content people don't mind when you try and promote something and if they do they can always leave your group and join another one.

I think most people tend to forget that this is just a tiny corner of facebook that we inhabit and there is potential for many people to service different strata of the facebook population. The marketing tools for creating targeted lists in any niche are amazing and this has barely even been tapped. Too many are people trying to make a fast buck without thinking about the damage this does to their reputation. One friend likened it to a room full of car salesmen all trying to sell cars to each other.

I haven't even mentioned the power of working together with other people with large networks and leveraging each other for mutual benefit. Or the benefits of having an integrated network where all your friends are friends with each other and what benefits that can give. That will be explored in later blog posts

Expanding Your Network Horizontally

Ok, So now you have 500 Friends, What Now?...

If you have been busy collecting friends on face book and not spent the time to segregate and analyse them then you have wasted a huge opportunity. Now you will have to go back and plough through a huge unmanageable list to find the diamonds and gold nuggets that you let slip through your fingers.

Time is your most Valuable Asset

Your time is your most valuable asset on facebook and learning how to leverage it effectively is going to be something everyone who is serious about social network marketing will have to learn.

As yet no one has developed an application to do this for us and unless you want to pay a lot of money for Act or other contact management software you are going to have to do the job by hand.

I discovered a great post on Brian Campbell's fan page wall by Kim Fleming (Austin, TX) she has her privacy settings on so I couldn't thank her for this. I hope she contacts me after I publish this

here is her short article, I have edited it and added a few of my own comments

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I wanted to show everyone my easy system for organizing their Friend List:

Organize Your Friend List

The Friend List is a private feature that only YOU can see. It is different from "Top Friends" or "Circle of Friends", which are optional applications.

The Friend List is an embedded feature in Facebook. Access it by following this path:

Go to FRIENDS on the top of your screen in your Facebook account

Click the drop-down arrow

Select "All Friends"

You will see a thumbnail (small picture) of each friend

The Friends List feature is on the right of the screen

It allows you to make a "new list", which is a way of organizing your friends.

Make Sub Lists

I made several "new lists" with these titles:

Categorise by Size

1-200

200-500

500-1000

1000-2000

2000-2500

2500+

Categorise by Type

Centres Of Influence

Family

Non-Internet Marketing

Not Active

Business/professional

Brian Campbell's Friends/fans

Analyse

What do those numbers mean?

Those numbers indicate the number of friends someone has; for instance, a friend with 397 friends would go in the Friend List titled 200-500.

After you have grouped your Friends List by level of activity, you are in a better position to leverage your time. And develop a strategy each time you go onto facebook and you have finished your basic administration of accepting friends, joining groups and answering messages.

Keep in mind some very important things:

Are they Newbies?

1. Look over your list of friends in the lowest category, those with 1 to 200 friends. Are they NEW TO FACEBOOK? You could be their first impression of Facebook. Show them how to add your blog feed to their page; get them into your funnel. Tell them the best groups to join and what friending strategies to use and how not to get themselves banned

Look for the Overlap

2. When adding friends, make note of how many mutual friends you have. If the friend has 500 friends, but you only 5 friends in common, there are 495 new people who will see your comments to that person's Wall. On the other hand, if someone has 500 friends, of whom 475 are the same as yours, then only 25 new people will see anything you post to that friend's profile page.

Build Relationships

3. Build relationships once you add friends. Get to know them, this doesn't mean just slapping your profile on their wall as many people seem to be doing. I look upon this as close to spam. It means spending a few minutes looking at their profile, checking out their blogg and then writing something that grabs their interest and might initiate a reply. I often write on the wall and then send a message saying I have written on the wall, with a brief introduction of myself.

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Be Attentive

That was a great piece of advice, its is so important to know where to spend your time. I make sure that as I add new friends I don't let any slip through the net, I need to know who everyone is, what their interests are, what business they are in, and how many friends they have.

More friends isn't necessarily better

What I discovered is having lots of friends isn't the most important factor. Don't get blasé when you reach 200 friends and think people with small friends lists aren't worth bothering with. Its quality not quantity that counts and often you will find someone who only has 30 or 40 friends but every single one of them is outstanding and has something in common with you.

High Value Profiles

After a while you can see what a high value profile looks like, its well organised, doesn't' t have lots of useless apps, every bit of real estate on the first 1-2 pages is highly optimised and geared to impress. Just having a professional photo on your profile says a lot about the person who is behind it. If you are targeting high income professionals to network with this is an easy way to move fast through someone else's huge list, just scroll down quickly and choose the people who jump out, It's what they intended by making their picture striking.

Be Yourself and Have Fun

I hope this has given you something to think about and set you to work exploring and getting to know your own list, the most important thing to remember is be yourself and have fun.

Don't get Banned

If you have a huge list or you manage several groups you stand the risk of getting banned if you send out too many messages in any one day. Facebook does not tolerate anyone marketing too agressively. Also cutting and pasting is a big No No. there is no quick way to get friends you have to do it the hard way unless you can make yourself famous and then people will flock to become your friend.

Build on a Solid Foundation

Provide valuable content, help as many people as you can and your reputation will slowly build itself on a solid foundation of relationships, friends and loyalties. A list of meaningless unknown faces that don't even know who you are is not a list you can leverage effectively.