Social Media. Is There Such A Thing As TMI?

I did something today that I haven’t done in a long, long time.

I either hid or outright unfriended two people on Facebook.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve unfriended people before. Stalkers or people who are just outright obnoxious. This time, though, I dumped people out of my newsfeed that were just, well, just always there. With stuff. Lots of stuff. Most of it innocuous stuff.

A lot of the time people kinda over shae their political views or their religious views. I get tired of it so I unfriend. Sometimes, I just want to thin the herd. I unfriend.

Most of the time, though, I’m perfectly happy friending virtually anyone. As Mike pointed out in his post about birthdays, I never know when one of the 5,000 people I don’t know may throw some business my way. In fact, that’s why I think people reach out to friend me…and share and share and share.

Like me, they’re in the real estate business and, my guess is, if they think they’re keeping in front of me by posting and posting and posting that one of these days I’ll have a referral for them. At least, I think that’s it.

Of course, there’s the whole Edgerank thing and indexing and backlinking and all kinds of other stuff designed to create great SEO or something.

Here’s the thing, though.  I kinda get tired of seeing the same old people at every third or fourth position in my newsfeed. Yeah, I know about lists and all that but the way I use Facebook (and I suspect the way a lot of “consumers” use Facebook) is to look at the newsfeed and scroll down. I post a  comment to things from people I know and, on the rare occasion, on something that someone I don”t know posted. I look at the Groups and the Pages to see if anything is interesting.

What I really have grown to dislike is the endless graphical quotes about what a wonderful life we’re having or endless photos of your lunch or endless photos of your current geographical location. Think lake, beach, balcony, hallway, back porch, deck, backyard, hospital, doctor’s office, kitchen, shopping center.  At some point it gets beyond social and into, well, I don’t know what you would call it.

Don’t get me wrong. I get a kick out of some of the YouTube stuff people post. I get a kick out of some of the cute puppy pictures and if something really horrible is going on in your life and you really need to tell the Internet, that’s OK.

Just keep it under 100 posts a day, if you can. Hey, I’m on social media way too much. I get it.  It’s more fun than TV and most of the time it beats reading a book. But, too much is too much.

So, I ask you.  Do you have a threshold for too much?