Will too many Facebook friends be the downfall of social media?

Just as brands up their spending on social media marketing, potentially worrying news reaches the industry: consumers are trusting their friends a lot less than they used to.

by Atifa Hargrave-Silk | 03/12/2010

An Edelman report recently found that only a quarter of those surveyed considered friends and peers to be credible sources of information. That’s down from almost half in 2008.

The findings have stirred up interest for obvious reasons, not least because the trust that consumers place in peer recommendations has been one of the primary drivers of the social web. It’s what has PR and digital agencies evangelising, and brands shifting marketing dollars online.

This precarious drop in trust is bad news. But is it surprising?

Part of the problem is that too many brands are treating social media like old media, resulting in a loss of credibility. The very forces that drive peer-to-peer networks - authenticity, one-to-one engagement and independence - are being torn apart by the traditional mass-approach tactics marketers are adopting in this space.

Consumers, meanwhile, have caught on to the fact marketers are increasingly behind influential blog posts or tweets, and are becoming sceptical about what they read from ‘friends’ on Facebook, Twitter or blogs. No wonder trust is eroding.

So are marketers themselves to blame? It’s the great fallacy of the internet that numbers mean success. It’s all to easy for brands (and agencies) to get lost in the blitz of data, which can be mind-boggling when it comes to the social web, where regular people can have a million followers on Twitter or a thousand Facebook friends. But these numbers may become the least interesting aspect of social media. For marketers, the devil, as they say, is in the detail.

What we’re finding with the social web is that the bigger networks get, the less trust there is in the individuals in them. BBH Labs’ Patricia McDonald posted an insightful blog on this, suggesting this lapse in trust is partly down to the fact that not all social media connections are equal.

Which makes complete sense if you think about it. On Facebook, there are people you communicate with regularly - what McDonald calls ‘thick connections’. Then there are those mates from school you accept as ‘friends’. These are people you haven’t talked to (or wanted to) in years. Yes, these connections bolster your numbers. But they’re ‘weak’, of very little value and rarely used.

Somewhere in this is an opportunity for brands, particularly if the future sees more niche and specialised networks. That’s not to suggest Facebook is going anywhere. But there has to be a tipping point for consumers bombarded with invitations to register and connect. This won’t necessarily be a bad thing for brands - not if it means, as a result of being more selective about the networks they sign up for, or the contacts they maintain, consumers are more actively involved and engaged.