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Social Media and Allowing Multiple Relationship Identifiers

Social media has revolutionized the way people communicate with each other. Not only has it provided a new way to communicate with a multitude of people quickly, but it also had allowed for a relatively permanent reflection of the past. This has caused people to form online connections with both people they know offline and people they have met online. However, many social media sites have few ways of distinguishing between types of relationships that a person may have or the current state of a relationship with another individual. Social media sites do not let you distinguish a relationship as a friendship, business connection, or school connection. Also, many social media sites allow others to see that there is some form of a connection between two individuals. Social media sites should provide options to allow users to distinguish their relationships with others so that users can differentiate between their professional and private.

Currently, many social media sites only allow for a select few ways of identifying your relationship with another user. Facebook for example lets you choose between friends, acquaintances, close friends, and an option for each of the groups that you are in. Facebook also lets you identify if a person is a family member, which is visible to others. Besides family members, these options are not shown to users viewing an account, meaning others just see them as your “friends.” The options for friends, close friends, and acquaintances only affect how many of those accounts’ posts a user see when looking at their main feed. From the perspective of a future employer, the options provided do not provide any information. For example, there is currently no way for an onlooker to be certain that two people are coworkers. Both people would have to provide information stating where they worked. After that, the use would have to look to find information on both accounts. Finally, you would only be able to tell if they worked at the same location, not even if they knew each from their jobs or some other way. By allowing users to customize how others can view the relationships that a user has with others, social media sites would allow users to more accurately describe their professional and private lives. By allowing a distinction between professional and private connections, all users would be able to more accurately build their online personas.

The remedy for this problem now is to use multiple accounts. However, managing multiple social media accounts from the same service, or even different services can be a hassle. A business owner from Georgia, Matthew Shirey, managed multiple social media accounts for his business. He eventually deleted his social media accounts when he stated, “he started feeling pressure to keep up with all the noise on every network” (Lytle). If he was able to have a single account that was able to be used for multiple purposes, he may not have felt overwhelmed by social media use. Shirey’s abandonment of social media would have likely made it more difficult to hire and interact with others at a professional level since he used social media as a social networking tool. Kristine Hovde, a website content manager at Smash Hit Displays puts it this way, “if you aren’t a member of a social networking site, there’s a good chance your competition already is” (Hovde). While not only hurting himself by withdrawing for social media, he helped his competition draw in customers. Social media is becoming more and more important as a way for not only individuals, but companies as well, to broadcast themselves to others. By not providing social media users the tools to let them express themselves online like they would in offline, it hurts users who withdraw from social media because the current method of differentiating between professional and private life is too labor intensive.

By allowing users to share with others the types of relationship they have with another, social media outlets would allow users to easily filter out messages that the user would post to more accurately make its way to the target audience. For instance, it would allow a user to easily send a personal message to only friends and family members while not letting acquaintances and coworkers from seeing that message. This would provide a more organic way of communication between users regardless of how many uses you have for a single social media account. After all, many users add coworkers as friends on Facebook. From a study done in 2012, “millennials become Facebook friends with an average of 16 of their coworkers” (Zimmerman). With the growth of social media over the past few years, it is likely this number has increased even more. It would also allow other users that are looking at an account of a prospective employer to get a better grasp of their personal interactions. As of May 2015, it was estimated that approximately 52% of companies looked at prospective employees’ social media accounts before they decided if they were going to hire them (Kumar). If they could distinguish between coworkers, friends, family, and acquaintances, it could help them determine which information would be more relevant in their decision about the individual. An employer would be able to easily distinguish a person’s professional and private lives to determine if they are either both or individually suitable for their company.

To solve this problem, users should be allowed to declare a type of connection when they add a person on social media sites if they choose to and later be able to alter that relationship without deleting it. Each person’s page that a user is friends with would be able to have an option to choose a relationship such as friend or coworker. However, unlike the current list, the option chosen would be available for other to see. For example, when adding a friend on Facebook, a user should be able to go to the other person’s account and either be allowed to choose from a more extensive list of types of relationships that you have with them or allow a custom type of relationship to be entered. This would help with the problem Dan Schawbel states; “Placing friends in certain groups on Facebook is difficult because the status of your connections evolves over time” (Schawbel). Connections would be able to change online to reflect online and offline relationships. By having this as an optional feature, users who do not want to state how they know another individual would not have to while simultaneously allowing users who are aware that others may be looking at their account from a professional standpoint to know more about them. If they chose to use it or not, users would at least have the ability to let them reflect their offline life onto their online life.

Some users may find this unnecessary or even confusing to implement a feature to allow for the ability to distinguish between different of relationships. They might say that having multiple social media accounts is not an inconvenience at all. However, Facebook already has a rule that states “You will not create more than one personal account” (“Statement of Rights and”). Alright, so maybe you cannot have multiple personal accounts on Facebook. That leaves two other options; you can manage multiple pages for distinct reasons or have accounts on different social media sites. However, while different pages would offer a way for messages from that group to be on a person’s wall, this would only work if all their interactions occurred in that group. After all, different social media sites are used for various reasons. For instance, if you see a connection between people on LinkedIn, a person might be led to assume that they have a professional relationship.  It  also might become more confusing if users do not agree on how that view each other. A person might see their coworkers as just that, coworkers, while their coworkers view them more as a friend rather than a coworker. This might confuse outsiders when look at the two accounts. Without the ability to clearly state how two people know each other, people will be unable to know the relationship between two people.

At the end of the day, connections on social media sites are mutually agreed upon. There are ways for a user to prevent others from activity on their account. However, social media is not being used by just friends trying to connect to each other anymore. Social media has become almost like a second world in which we are able to maintain current relationships and even build new ones. Businesses are using this information in making decisions that have an outcome with real world implications. With social media becoming more prevalent in offline life, it needs to be more reflective of it. Providing users with the ability to categorize their relationships with others would be a great step forward in this endeavor. As social media continues to advance and becomes an even larger part of both peoples’ personal and professional lives, it will be important that users are able to express themselves more clearly to not only their friends but strangers as well.

 

Works Cited

Hovde, Kristin. “Multiple Social Media Accounts Is a Must.” Business.com, Business, 22 Feb. 2017, www.business.com/articles/why-every-business-should-be-using-multiple-social-media-accounts/.

Kumar, S. “Employee Social Media Monitoring Is a Bad Idea.” Time, Time, 22 May 2015, time.com/3894276/social-media-monitoring-work/.

Lytle, Ryan. “When One Social Network Is Enough.” Mashable, Mashable, 26 May 2013, mashable.com/2013/05/26/social-network-enough/#n.N8BiD8HZqU.

Schawbel, Dan. “Is It a Bad Idea to Friend Co-Workers on Facebook? How About Your Boss?” Time, Time, 17 Jan. 2012, business.time.com/2012/01/17/is-it-a-bad-idea-to-friend-co-workers-on-facebook-how-about-your-boss/.

“Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.” Facebook, Facebook, 30 Jan. 2015, www.facebook.com/legal/terms.

Zimmerman, Kaytie. “Should Millennials Be Facebook Friends With Their Coworkers?” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 16 Aug. 2016, www.forbes.com/sites/kaytiezimmerman/2016/08/16/should-millennials-be-facebook-friends-with-their-coworkers/#51de06a12f6d.