Behaviour Speaks : What Our Social Media Is Really Telling Us.

August 3, 2017

I was having an interesting conversation recently with a good friend of mine. She was telling me, how much she wasn’t enjoying Facebook anymore. “When I signed up” (8 years ago), she said, “I used to see all of my friends updates every day. Nowadays, I hardly see anyone’s updates. Facebook has spoilt the party.”

It was a good-natured conversation and she was ranting about Facebook. Really, she should be blaming herself. Why?

Part of my mantra is to ensure you keep your best people close to you. If you want someone in your life make them a priority. Make the effort to enjoy their company and keep them close, remove the ones that are poisonous and toxic. Keep the ones you love close.

What Are You Saying?

What does this have to do with not seeing your friend’s posts on Facebook?

Facebook have made the decision that many of us can’t or won’t. They have chosen to remove those friends, families and acquaintances that we won’t. They have made the decision to stop showing us updates, photos and videos from many on our friends list.

And we have brought this upon ourselves. WHAT! You might say.

They say behaviour speaks and in every case, this is true. In this case, it’s 100% true. It’s our behaviour that drives the algorithms behind our social media feeds. If we like something and engage with it, the algorithm picks that up and continues to show us. If we stop engaging with it, liking it, sharing it or throwing in our witty remarks, the artificial intelligence behind the algorithm picks that up as well.

And it stops showing you that stuff.

What’s Really Happening? Behaviour Speaks

When my friend tells me, she isn’t seeing her friends updates anymore, what she is really saying is that they maybe, they aren’t her friends anymore. Our social media channels are just formalising our behaviours. For whatever reason, she had stopped interacting with some of her “friends” so Facebook made the call that those updates were no longer important and made the decision for her. That’s happening with your feed now. RIght now. The less you interact with someone, the less you see.

Behaviour speaks. When your friends come up to you and innocently ask if you’re still on Facebook, because they are no longer seeing your updates, just think about what they are really saying. And that’s ok. We lose people on our journey of life and we lose people for many reasons. Often we grow apart, we move away, we get jealous, we stop seeing them and our world moves on.

We are rapidly moving towards a world where our phones will know us better than we know ourselves. A world where artificial intelligence becomes a norm and an influence in our days. This may seem overwhelming, but remember the simple equation that will still stand true.