The Social Media Apathy Ratio Examined

People are crazy and times are strange

I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range

I used to care, but things have changed

Dylan

NOTE: The opinions expressed in this post are exactly that, and all based on my own experiences in social media and the other place called the real world.

About a year and a half ago ago now I took down my Facebook account. I wrote a post about it, citing my reasons at the time, the foremost among them was the incredible proliferation of bullshit by people I didn’t really know and their creepy friends.

I had about 2200 'friends’ on FB at the time, the vast majority of whom requested me to friend them.

One day, with nothing better to do, I did a rough count of the actual number of those people with whom I was interacting. That number was just over 100 people, many of whom I knew personally from my 3-D life.

Then I looked at the number of agenda-based orgs and companies who had snuck in there, and were posting crap and that I had no interest in and that added up to another hundred or so.

So then I asked myself; what about the other 2000?

At the time, I didn’t think to attribute any sort of quality to them. But the question remained. I mean, how could I have accumulated 2200 friends on the world’s biggest social media site and never actually hear from about 90% of them?

But this morning, thinking about what I wanted to write about today, the thought occurred to me, that it could very well be that these people are nothing more than apathetic.

It’s The Same On LinkedIn

Because I blog a lot and have developed channels of distribution beyond the hopelessly cluttered, notification-challenged confines of LinkedIn Pulse,  I still manage to get at least a couple link requests a day.

My connections have grown from about 300 when I started blogging there to more than 2300. Since I have never been big on quantity v quality that’s actually quite a lot for me.

But what I have dubbed the “Apathy Ratio” is still about the same as it is on Facebook. 90% give or take.

So I am starting to see a trend here.

Is ‘Social’ Media Really All That Social?

Social Media. Two words. One of them is social. Yet the vast majority of the people I am allegedly connected to are nowhere to be seen or heard from. Very unsociable to be sure.

So the questions then become, what the hell are they doing here? Or are they here at all? And if they’re not here at all, meaning if they don’t really have any presence besides a half-baked profile and a few connections, do they really count as anything?

Does this make LinkedIn’s powerful boast that that they have more that 500 million active members and Facebook’s even more grandiose boast of close to two billion nothing but bullshit? Could be. Stranger things have happened.

Apathy & Bullshit…The New Online Dynamic Duo

I do have a certain amount of sympathy for all the apathetic people out there. For many, participating on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn is really a lot of work. And it’s not for the feint of heart.

But the fact that they’re here, even if they’re not here, makes them a stat that the owners of these sites can market. And they do. And this really does create the impression that these sites are happening places, when in fact they could be nothing more than a bunch of relatively small networks of people who are active and have found each other.

Otherwise known as the Good Side of the Apathy Ratio.

What Can We Do About Apathy In Social Media?

I’m not sure there is much that will work to drag these huge numbers of apathetic people out of their comas.

So in my opinion, all you can do you can do is nurture and support your own smaller networks. Because at the end of the day that’s pretty much all we have here.

And don’t feel bad about deep-sixing anyone who you are linked to but have never heard from in any way, shape or form. They probably won't miss you anyway.

In a way it’s kind of like life, where you can count yourself lucky to have a handful of good friends.

I count myself lucky both here on beBee.com where I create my long format posts and have a small group of talented active compadres.  On Facebook, I am boasting about 150 'friends' many of of whom I actually know or have a connection to. And on LinkedIn, I am able to attract a lot of comments to my posts, but mostly from people who think I work for the Democrats in the US, because I spend a lot time calling out the Republicans for their evil deeds and criticize you know who.

Needless to say my Apathy Ratio is getting better all the time. But it's certainly a lot of uphill work to achieve that.

So my advice to anyone who feels this way is simple. Do a little housekeeping and remember that the impact you make on social media is way more qualitative than it is quantitative.

jim out

He has published more than 1100 long format posts over the past 20 years, and never seems to get tired of writing new ones.

You can follow Jim in the following places:

On beBee: https://www.bebee.com/bee/jim-murray

On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-murray-b8a3a4/

On Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jimbobmur

On Facebook: https://tinyurl.com/y97gxro4