Socially Inept, But Oh So Comfy Cozy

A couple of months ago, I reactivated my FB account, which was directly due to the fact that my publisher is very keen on using the social media to market and promote their business.

One of the first things that I did shortly after reactivating, was to purge a few people from my circle. It wasn't due to me being upset with them, 'cause I wasn't, but more due to the fact that I really had nothing left in common with them anymore.

The second thing that I did, which was the easiest, was to purge a boatload of pages. Most of them were for business that I no longer patronize, but a few were entertainment oriented.

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 After I had finished doing those two items, I got busy retooling my profile. And no, I did not activate that nasty Timeline feature, because that is what drove me away in the first place.

I added a new avatar:  yes, that wonderful little cover pic that makes people look thrice and comment either very positive (wow! she's hot!) or slightly negative (holy cow!); and tweaked my privacy settings so that people could read, but not comment unless they were friends, and find me on FB (but not on a public search engine).

The next thing I did, after settling down to a comfy routine of pretty much posting links to my blog and the occasional extreme right of center events that is the world of moi, was to start expanding my circle of friends with people I have something in common with.

This time around, it was easier to do, since a lot of the suggestions that FB were throwing at me were fellow writers that I already knew. I also picked up a couple of non-writers as well.

There were two unintended consequences to me going off on a friendship splurge. One was that I gained a wider audience for my blog, as I happened to get a few more page views and two, I gained a few more followers as well.

Over the years, I made it a point that I wasn't trying to accumulate followers for my blog simply to become Mr. Popularity. I was trying to accumulate followers because I wanted people to know the real me, and build up a base of friends and readers who wanted to stop by because they truly liked what I wrote. And I like to think that I've succeeded.

Now believe it or not, there is a downside to all of this. While I've been relatively fanatical about my privacy, which is to be considered very odd since I have a blog that is filled with all kinds of juicy tidbits about myself over the years, during my first stint on FB it allowed me the freedom to say what I want when I want. This is not the case now.

Now is having to watch what I say. I do this a lot on my blog already, because I don't know who might be reading my blog at a given moment, so the last thing I want someone to do, is to use what I say to get me into trouble (for now).

So now I have to apply the same philosophy on what I post for status updates or what I might contribute to a FB friend's discussion thread. Six degrees, or in this case, 16 degrees of separation.

In spite of that small bout of self-censorship that I have to contend with, I'm really starting to get into the groove of enjoying FB for what it was originally intended to be, and not what it has morphed into.

And that my friends, is the only way to stay comfy cozy while socially networking, because quite frankly, socially networking is just that, nothing more and certainly nothing less.

And if you want a FB friend who doesn't play games but simply posts at the most five or six status updates per week, then by all means, check me out. I don't bite, I don't bother people, and best of all, you can subscribe to my status updates, just like you would do a blog.