You have probably heard of Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Habits, but did you know there are also 7 Highly Effective Habits for Facebook Success? PsyBlog has a great post that cites different social media studies to determine how to make yourself into the best (or best looking) Facebooker you can be. We have adjusted their list Salty Waffle style, and stayed true to the science behind each habit. Enjoy!
- The Optimal Number of Friends Is: Between 100 and 300. Studies show that social attractiveness ratings peaked at around 150 friends, the same number of relationships psychologists believe humans can maintain.
- Get Hot Friends: Studies showed that people with more attractive friends surrounding them were perceived as more attractive.
- Understand Why People Join Facebook: There are 7 main reasons people join; connect with old friends, social surveillance (friends), look up people they just met offline, people watching (strangers), status updating, and sharing content.
- Don’t Stalk, Too Much: We wrote a little while ago how Facebook can make you jealous, keep in mind how much time you spend digging for information you may not like.
- Learn How To Use Your Privacy Settings: Use of these settings is on the rise, even among young people, but there is still a large chunk of the Facebook population that doesn’t understand just how much information they are sharing.
- Be Real: Show the real you. Not only because it’s easier to maintain one life than two, but generally people figure it out if you are a poser. On top of that, studies show that people are typically very honest online so you don’t want to be the only faker.
- Don’t Separate Business and Personal: This is something near and dear to us at Salty Waffle, and studies show that people can effectively use Facebook to get jobs, contacts, and other important connections. People on Facebook are just that, people. You should be too!
To check out some of these studies in more depth, check out the Psyblog article and follow the links to the various journals they cite.
Hopefully this won’t result in a bunch of friends shaving me off their friend lists to get down to the right number or removing my posts from their wall to boost the overall ‘hotness’ of their page, but the science shows that people with Facebook pages that follow these 7 habits were perceived the best. The science behind social media is fascinating yeah?