Friends In Reality
“You HAVE to come. This is important to me. I need you there. PLEASE,” I texted a close friend a few weeks ago.
It’s rare that I lay this much on anyone
to do anything, but I had an event that I really needed my friends to support, and the text-beg was my futile attempt to make sure I had what was crucial: Not a large crowd, but a quality one.
Of course, he didn’t show up. That’s life.
People? Are flakes.
The more you rely on others to do anything, the more disappointed and cynical you will become. You have to keep your head up in these situations, or life will start to really suck.
How did I take this most recent case? I was relieved. Now I get a free pass to flake on him.
It’s sad, but the reality is many of our friends on social media may not even be our friends, and our connections might not actually be worth our time. I realize this every time I manually click through my friend list that pops up as I create events on Facebook.
There are a ton of apps you can use to select your entire friends list at one time (try the Invite Them All extension for Chrome), but the reality is there are too many people I’m connected to whom I might not want to invite.
It’s not just on Facebook. I also know this every time I open my Instagram and see three or four new followers, but then they rarely “like” a post, or even more seldom leave any comments. Who are all these people, and why do they think it’s cute to follow and not engage? In fact, some followers aren’t even real, so you’ll never get any engagement out of them anyway. If you’ve bought followers at any point, you might find your profile full of bots, which isn’t good for making genuine friends at all. Before buying followers with somewhere like Trusy in the future, you might want to read these legit Trusy.co reviews first. Reading reviews will help you to recognise false claims and inflated statements, meaning you’re more likely to buy real followers rather than bots.
There was a time when I didn’t even look at who was requesting me on Facebook, I just accepted them. I figured, hey, if they want to be my friend, that’s great! I later came to understand just how damaging this could be when I found out that Facebook only allows individuals to connect with 5,000 people max. I hit that last year and have been reviewing individual requests since then. If it’s someone I actually know, then I have to delete someone to add them. From this I’ve learned the hard way that keeping a quality social media list where the people are actually people is way more valuable than having 872,937,598 “connections.”
There are a few apps I’ve been trying to clean up the Facebook mess I made. But the only fool-proof way to remove multiple friends on Facebook is to click on your profile, then click Activity Log. On the left-hand column there will be a few selections. If you don’t see “Friends” click “more.”
Once you see your friend activity, you see that it’s listed newest first, but you can select certain years or months in the right-hand column.
Instagram followers who do not engage are called “ghost” followers. I tried out a few apps and websites to get rid of my ghosts without much success. Every app I used would lock up during the evaluation phase. The only app I got to work was InstaGhost, which detected that about 12 percent of my friends are ghosts. When I clicked on the list, I found there were a few people I actually know, so I didn’t want to get rid of them. There were a lot of companies and other non-people type of accounts I was able to remove, but for the most part, it just looks like my friends are more lurkers than engagers.
I guess you can’t win them all.
@SUPERCW
Christa Wittmier is “SUPERCW” on pretty much all social media. Find her on Snapchat, Soundcloud, Twitter, Vine and, of course, Instagram. By night, she is known as DJ SuperCW and as the pool party queen, running the Bacardi Pool Party and the Grey Goose Dayclub. By day, she is known as senior marketing director for Young’s Market Company of Hawaii.
