Monday, January 12, 2009

Tamar Weinberg on Facebook Etiquette

Tamar Weinberg has an excellent post over at Techipedia titled The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook. In her post Tamar discusses a number of social media utilities including a couple of my favorites - Facebook and Twitter. Here's are some Facebook egregious sins that you must not perform on social media sites. Tamar says avoiding these violations will help you learn how to manage and maintain online relationships on a variety of popular social media sites.

  • Adding users as friends without proper introductions. If you’re looking to make friends, tell people who you are. Don’t assume they know you — especially if they, well, don’t.
  • Abuse application invites and consistently invite friends to participate in vampire games. Many call this spam.
  • Abusing group invites. If your friends are interested, they’ll likely join without your “encouragement.” And if they don’t accept, don’t send the group request more than once by asking them to join via email, wall post, or Facebook message.
  • Turning your Facebook profile photo into a pitch so that you can gather leads through your Facebook connections. Thanks, but no thanks. Facebook is about real friendships and not about business — at least not to me.
  • Using a fake name as your Facebook name. I can’t tell you how many people have added me and their last name is “Com” or “Seo.” I’m not adding you unless you can be honest about who you are. Once upon a time, Facebook deleted all of the accounts that portrayed people as business entities or things. I wish Facebook would employ the same tactics yet again, because I’m not adding a fake identity as a friend.
  • Publicizing a private conversation on a wall post. In case it isn’t obvious, Facebook wall posts are completely public to all your friends (unless you tweak your privacy settings). Private matters should be handled privately: via email or even in Facebook private messages.
  • Tagging individuals in unflattering pictures that may end up costing your friends their jobs. Avoid the unnecessary commentary also, especially on your childhood pictures that portray your tagged friends as chubby and not so popular. Further, if your friends request to be untagged, don’t make a stink of it.
Good advice, especially to those just starting out with Facebook. Be sure to read Tamar's entire post linked here.

2 comments:

Lori Weir said...

About adding friends w/o introductions...I was told emphatically by my 14 year old son that kids (his age) don't screen users, they just add them. This after he perused his younger sister's list of friends and discovered (to his horror) that she had "friend-ed" some of his friends. He wanted me to make her un-friend them. She claimed they requested her not the other way around. What it sounded like was these kids just went through someone else's list of friends and randomly added without any “proper introduction.” At the time I wondered if (another) conversation about internet safety was in order but figured I had done the best I could with that one and anything more would be white noise. All in all I found it to be an interesting observation of the (generational?) user differences of FBers.

Gordon F Snyder Jr said...

That is interesting Lori. I think a lot of people are using Twitter that way also – someone follows you and you almost automatically follow them back.