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- Nobody “Likes” me, but it’s okay. I’m stronger than that!
by Veronica Forand
When I joined Facebook, I became friends with literally hundreds of amazing people from every continent (except Antarctica), every political affiliation from fascism to communism to anarchism and a multitude of religions and non-religions.
In short, I felt popular.
Alas, getting friends is the easy part of Facebook. The key to success is not the amount of friends you have, but how much your friends “Like” you. If you are unsure about your true popularity, send out a random “Hi” into the Facebook stream of ramblings at a time when most humans are awake and at a keyboard. Seven pm is generally a good time to do this. You should have your message “Liked” by at least one person per every hundred friends you have. I devised this ratio during a two second brainstorming session. My success rate is about half of that. The result? I’m pretty much a cyberspace loser. Even worse, there are times that nobody in the Facebook world “Likes” what I have written. Nobody. Do my posts just zip by every one of my friends and they ignore them or are there nefarious forces in Facebook determining popularity among various Friends.
Facebook would love me to pay to make my posts more important on the screens of my friends and followers. I just can’t do that. The thought that paying to make myself more popular would make me feel even more ridiculous than I do now when I turn on Facebook and hope that I have at least one person who responded to something I wrote. Can you imagine paying extra money for some extra attention and still not receiving notice? I’m just not strong enough for that kind of rejection. For now, I hope to get one person “Like” something I posted. One connection among a billion.
After that, I’ll go home and snuggle my kids, my husband and my dog. Those connections have a much better “Like” ratio.
Pish-posh. You are not a cyberspace loser. Everyone isn’t monitoring their FB feeds 24-7, even if it seems like they are. Every moment there’s a stream of posts hitting their feeds and unfortunately posts get buried under the others. Don’t feel bad. There’s lots of factors that go into it.
Thanks for the encouragement. I love sending random things into Facebook and seeing if anyone picks them up. Every once in a while…
Isn’t it crazy how social media skews our self-esteem? It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the stats, but as long as there’s at least one person around who will give me a real-life hug when I need one, I figure I’m doing OK.
Technology can make a person crazy. That was the good thing about living two hundred years ago. You may have been an outcast in your village, but not among the billions of people in the world.