I’m pretty selective in who I connect with on my personal facebook account. For me, facebook is my inner sanctum, and people who I choose to socialise without outside of any business relationship or context. Like many people on facebook, this is where I relax with friends – and if I choose to follow your business page it is because I am genuinely interested and engaged in your brand. However, recently I’ve had to have some quiet words with a few people I’ve connected with recently, explaining why I may have to unfriend them. Here is why:

1. Over posting

This is a very common problem on facebook – and probably the main reason why someone will ‘hide’ you or unfriend you on facebook. Facebook is a different communication medium to twitter – and many enthusiastic trainers often treat their facebook account like twitter. Typically most facebook users will only go into facebook once or twice a day at most, and if you have filled up their news stream, it’s pretty unpopular. Whereas, you need to be tweeting 5-10 times a day to get the visibility you need on twitter, posting 3-4 times a day is probably the maximum amount of posts you should do a day on facebook.

2. Putting twitter status through facebook

I’ll say it again. Facebook is not Twitter. Many  people make the mistake of putting all their tweets through their facebook personal page (or business page for that matter) People on Facebook are educated to receive more than 140 characters in their updates, and actually prefer a little more information – and curation of content in the update. Use the ‘selective tweets’ facebook application (rather than the twitter facebook application which send all of your tweets to your facebook page) to be able to choose which of your tweets you will post through to facebook.

3. Too business focused on a personal account

Facebook is the ultimate SOCIAL networking site – people want to relax with friends on facebook. They don’t want it to be all business business business. If you are using facebook as a marketing tool then sign up for a business page – and then let people opt into your facebook business page. I have unfriended myself from a few of my networking buddies as I was fed up of reading self serving links and marketing materials – and no personal updates.