When it comes to social networking, is bigger better? Many think a big network gives you reach and, potentially, that holy grail of "influence". But others are discovering that a lot of connections may be less valuable than a smaller circle. With an enormous collection of friends or followers, you lose the benefits of intimacy, discoverability and trust.
Social networks can help us to balance the influence of large networks with the benefits of small networks, but to do so they need features that let users focus on subsets of connections or followers. Most of the time we want to connect to people for specific purposes – and that’s not possible with networks that encourage filling a one-size-fits-all contact list.
Let’s take LinkedIn as an example. Its greatest value is its ability to introduce you to people who can make a difference to your work. But you can only expand your network if your second-degree connections are connected to someone you could ask for an introduction. When you connect with everybody, your second-degree search results will include people who don’t know anyone you know.
LinkedIn’s connection process has been streamlined so that outreach favours quantity over quality. It’s easy to imagine the logic behind this: The more connection requests people send, the more users there are. And the more connections people have, the more they will use the platform.
This is a problem LinkedIn could solve if it allowed people to categorise connections and use those categories to filter search results. Helping people to differentiate between close contacts and other connections would allow LinkedIn to serve its goal of growing its network while serving those who want to use it for making professional introductions.
Ambitious
If this seems ambitious, it shouldn't: other social networks already offer this option. Facebook does it best. You can friend up to 5,000 people and let even more people friend you. But you can also create lists of people with whom you share specific content, or use your restricted list so that some people see only your public content.
These options help you achieve the benefits of intimacy without cutting off the opportunities that come from having more connections.
Just as important, Facebook lets you see other people’s news in specific contexts. If you are overwhelmed by your news feed, you can zero in on updates from people in a specific list.
You can achieve the same thing on Twitter by organising your Twitter friends into lists. Both networks help people to balance the value of a big network and the value of focused conversation.
Connecting online is now as big a part of our professional networking as face-to-face interactions. But just as in the offline world, some of those connections are more meaningful than others. Translating those variations into our online experience would help professionals to remember what they are trying to achieve: reach and influence, yes, but also the relationships that can transform our careers. – (Copyright Harvard Business Review 2016) Alexandra Samuel is the author of Work Smarter With Social Media
