Social Media Etiquette – Are There Rules to Friending People?

This guest post is contributed by Shannon Wills, she writes on the topic of Internet Service Providers . She welcomes your comments at her email id: shannonwills23@gmail.com.

Social Media Etiquette – Are There Rules to Friending People?


I admit I’m an avid user of Facebook; I don’t have too many friends because I am anal about adding only people I know personally, and I connect to an even smaller group on a regular basis. Now in an ideal world, I would prefer to have only the second group of people on my friend list, but then, it’s not easy to refuse the myriad friend requests I receive.

It’s not just me, most users of social media experience this discomfort – you know the person who sent the request through a common friend but you’ve never really interacted with them in any great depth; they may be friends of friends and you don’t want to be rude by refusing them because you may have met briefly once in the past; or they may be schoolmates or people you went to college with but knew only on a hi-bye basis. You don’t really want to friend all these people, but how do you say no thanks politely?

It’s easier to just accept them and add them to your list of friends, after which you can block them out of your wall and don’t allow them access to your photographs and other private information. The trouble with this is, if they know anything about social networks, they know that you’ve blocked them out and are bound to get affected. Isn’t ignoring their friend request a better option to accepting them and then blocking them out? Which is the lesser of the two evils?

And then there’s the issue of your family on Facebook – to tell you the truth, I am not comfortable with my family seeing the side that my friends see and being privy to my thoughts and plans via my status messages. I would also like to keep my interactions with my friends away from my family for the simple reason that I don’t want to provide fodder for the family gossip circle. But then, I cannot offend extended family members who want to be my “friends”. So I accept them, and allow them limited access. But how do I take care of the random calls I get asking why they cannot see the pictures that someone else on my list claimed to have seen?

Do you really need this hassle when you’re just trying to relax and hang out with a few of your good friends on Facebook? Why don’t people realize that it’s not a crime that people you barely know don’t want to open their lives up to you completely? If you see that you’ve been blocked out of their wall, why not take the hint and defriend them? You get back some of your self-respect this way and also avoid sending out further friend requests to people you hardly know, unless you’re a sucker for more punishment that is.

I know there are no real rules on how to choose your Facebook friends, but when did common sense and self-respect fly out of the window too?


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