2011-07-29 Adding people on social media

Before adding me to your circles, you should have some basic info about you on your public profile. Even better, you should have posted a few things. Why is this you ask? Once you add me to your circles, I will get a notification that you did so. I will get this notification at some point in the very near future and I’ll follow the link to your profile in order to decide what to do: ignore you, or add you to one of my circles. If all I know is your name and your gender, chances are I won’t recognize you, and worse, I won’t know if we share any interests. I have no circle to add you to. I’ll ignore you and never come back.

If you missed your chance, the only way I’ll go back and revisit this decision is when mutual friends share some interesting posts of yours, or if your many thoughtful posts in my Incoming stream catch my eye—but I rarely go there because my life is already full of posts by people that made a favorable first impression. Getting a second chance is a lot harder.

Don’t miss your first chance. Add some interesting stuff to your profile and write a handful of posts before adding more people to your circles.

(This was written for Google+ but it’s true for all social media sites.)

​#Social Media