Thursday, May 5, 2011

What Your Facebook Behavior Says About You


With over 500 million active users and the average user having 130 friends*, we’ve pretty much seen it all when it comes to online behavior and personas. The premise of the site makes it easy to create new impressions by showing other sides of yourself. Shy people may find confidence behind the keyboard to share aspects of their lives that they wouldn’t in a face-to-face setting, and others love having the ability to share elements of their daily lives with many people at once.

Whatever your reasons for engaging with Facebook, your online behavior can reveal certain elements of your personality, perhaps ones you didn’t intend. Here are just a few.

If You: Update several times per day with every little detail of your life
Then You: May have a circle of Facebook friends who are truly interested in what you had for breakfast or your child’s potty-training progress. There is likely a larger group who doesn’t care. Professional contacts may question your judgment.

If You: Judge people who update several times per day with every little detail of their lives
Then You: Share an opinion with many others. However, keep in mind that people have different reasons for interacting with online social communities. If it isn’t hurting anyone, why worry about it?

If You: Friend your personal and professional contacts on the same page (not a fan page) and proceed to broadcast and sell all the livelong day
Then You: Need to look up the definition of “online community,” and pay particular attention to the word “community.”

If You: Unfriend. Then refriend. Then unfriend. Then refriend.
Then You: Really need to grow up. Sadly, this doesn’t apply solely to teens. It has been the case where grown adults become irritated with others and unfriend them to make a point, only to refriend them after patching things up - a passive-aggressive move since many have several Facebook friends and don’t usually realize they’ve been unfriended (oh, the horror).

If You: Frequently stop in your tracks to update your Facebook status, i.e. while marching in a parade, while standing at the altar during your nephew’s baptism, during a first date, or right in the middle of a fitness instructor training (just sayin’)....
Then You: May have a serious problem and could be missing out on the fullness of each experience.

If You: Enjoy posting to your status cryptic updates or inside jokes that only one or two people will understand
Then You: Risk alienating everyone else. Then again, annoying as it may be, if you aren’t hurting anyone, who really cares?

*Source: Facebook.com statistics
Photo Credit: Tipdeck.com