Unfriending, unfollowing, whatever you want to call it – we’ve all done it. Managing social network connections is like decluttering your digital life. Which, considering our digital lives tend to be bigger than most of us would like to admit, can be a really hefty task. Perhaps you chip away at it, unfollowing an account immediately when you see an eye-roll inducing or cringe-causing post. Or, maybe you log on to Facebook every six months and routinely go through your list of friends to unfriend the middle school classmates or random strangers. Whether you maintain constant vigilance or save it for the purge, managing digital connections can take up quite a bit of our time and mental energy.
So why is the unfriending trend so widespread? The longer we have social media accounts, the more we tend to accumulate in them. We post more photos, share more funny videos, favorite more Tweets, and yes – follow more people. As our content sharing and interests grow and change, we track trends and themes and end up following new accounts. And so our social media feeds become stuffed with posts from people we used to know or no longer do, people whose content we used to like, or complete strangers. Unfollowing becomes a necessary burden in maintaining a properly curated social media feed.
Following different accounts affects more than just what we see in our feeds – it affects what others see in our profiles via our Facebook Friends list or Instagram Following list. In connecting with people, we see their content, but we are also associating ourselves with them. Who we connect to on social networks changes the type of content we expose ourselves to, but it also changes how others may view us. Who we follow matters.
It can help to be careful of which people we add as friends on Facebook, or which accounts we follow on Twitter. But for most of us, we’ve already accumulated so many connections that we can’t possibly keep track of the hundreds, maybe thousands of people we associate with and follow. And if we can’t keep track of them all, that means we certainly can’t know for sure if every connection is a positive influence in our lives and worth keeping in our network. Or, that every connection can even be trusted at all. Are you comfortable with every one of your Facebook friends viewing all of your family photos and location updates? Does it give you pause that employers may look into your Twitter or Instagram accounts to see which users you are following?
How we network on social media matters. Liking one post and clicking ‘follow’ becomes a public display of allegiance, and staying friends with a summer-camp-buddy-turned-criminal could be a hazard to personal safety. Luckily, Go2s is a secure, private network that is focused on helping you build safe, trusted, connections where you can share what really matters. With Go2s, you don’t have to worry about who is seeing your baby photos or where your location is being shown. Everything is under your control, whether you want to share it with just a few friends or to all of your friends plus their friends. You won’t have to worry about unfriending or unfollowing, because Go2s is where you are in control of your connections that matter.