fourworlds

“Who Cares” is the essential question to ask yourself before posting to a social network. One way to evaluate your social circles is to rate them on:

• how much a typical member cares about you
• how interested they are in a particular topic.

This concept can be used to divide followers and social network friends into four general groups which are pictured as quadrants on the chart:

• High Interest - Low Relationship
• High Interest - High Relationship
• Low Interest - High Relationship
• Low Interest - Low Relationship

Each of our social networks is likely weighted in a particular quadrant. My Facebook Friends, for instance, are mostly co-workers, friends and family. So I’ll routinely post personal anecdotes because most people have enough context to appreciate them.

My Twitter followers tend to be people with strong common interests but little or no preexisting personal relationships. I tend to post links or comments on topics related to technology, along with brief personal comments.

Of course, there are almost always sub-groups within each social network. There are a few ways to deal with this problem:

• Use internal flitering capabilities such as Friend Lists in Facebook. You can post to a sub-section, rather than the whole group. The problem with this approach is that most services don’t support filtering very well, if at all.
• Use multiple identities. I have multiple accounts on most social sharing services I use. “Alt” accounts allow me to have social circles with very narrow focuses of interest. The problem with this approach is that it dilutes the power of the network. Ideally, instead of just following an identity on Twitter, you could subscribe to one or more topic feeds.

The real world is much messier than the depiction in the chart. That’s always the case, isn’t it?