How To Develop Friendships in a Social Media World

I was having dinner with a few friends last week and what you are about to read is a reflection based on our private conversation.

Remember a few days ago when I shared 2 ways to make an impact?  I wrote that a few days before the dinner and what you are reading now, I wrote 24 hours after the dinner.

First, the Problem:

We live in a short attention span society where the term Friend is used to mean almost anything compared to just 20 years ago.

For example, Friend was a term for a person that you knew and who knew you. You may have hung out together, worked together, gone to class together, been neighbors, etc.  The key is you knew each other and would do things together because you enjoyed each other.

Today, thanks to the terminology of the biggest social media network in the world, yes I’m talking about Facebook, a Friend is not the same as it was previously.

I just checked and I am connected to 1014 people on Facebook.  They are called Friends. I do not know each of them well enough to be called Friends in the traditional sense, but that’s the label Facebook uses.  I looked at my Facebook Friends Friends lists and saw that the number of Facebook Friends ranged from 70 to nearly 5000.  Now to be fair, the couple of friends who were at 4k and 5k are radio personalities and that is why their numbers are so high.

So have we changed the meaning of a Friend in this social media world?

Is Social Media reducing the quality of our relationships?

Or is it just an excuse?

Let’s go back to the dinner conversation.

The conversation took place at a downtown restaurant with a select group of people.  The group was hand picked.  All we originally had in common was a social media connection.

I have made plenty of connections via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  Many are here in Indiana, both Fort Wayne and Indianapolis.  Randy Clark from Indianapolis invited me to something he called a Friend Up 3 years ago and I went along with a couple of other Fort Wayne friends.  I was a regular for awhile as my schedule allowed me to attend and eventually we decided to launch a Friend Up in Fort Wayne.

The dinner last week was our monthly Fort Wayne Friend Up. We had 6 show up, a few others were planning on making it but other obligations came up.  That was okay.  We are planning on launching a breakfast version too that will accommodate folks who are unable to meet for dinner.  Some of us will probably attend both.  Every couple of months we invite new people to join us too.

So far, nearly everything you’ve read is just laying the foundation for what inspired me to write this article.

One of the “new” people at our dinner shared that they were very discouraged about making friends in our city. She and her husband have lived here for about 3 years and from what she had said previously, she was very involved in the community.  She serves on a number of boards and committees and is a very social person, but…

What about those traditional friendships?  She and her husband felt that they were not connected on a deeper level, the kind of friendship that I described at the beginning of this piece.  The kind of friend that you can hang out with and be yourself, be fun, be crazy, be serious, be sad, and be real with.

We talked about that for a bit.  It takes courage to say what she said, but the only way to move forward sometimes is to expose yourself like that.  Those moments of vulnerability are moments that genuine friendships can start.

The Solution:

In a nutshell, How to Develop Friendships in a Social Media World, is to simply use the social media as another communication tool.  Social Media rarely will take the place of face to face time at least when we are talking about developing genuine friendships.

My wife and I met online on a dating site 14 years ago.  If we never met face to face, we would have never married.  Same thing with your social media connections.  Make a point to see them face to face, one on one or in a small group.  (Big group settings can lead to “fractured conversations” but that’s another article I need to write.

All of us are busy.  Each of us manage to fill all 24 hours of each day. That’s 168 hours every week.  Our challenge is to be sure to connect with others in meaningful ways and it can be done.

Follow up:

Our Fort Wayne Friend Up uses a private Facebook Group to communicate, and it was a pleasant surprise when our new friend shared how much we enjoyed being out with the rest of us.  We were just being friendly!