e-Networking: Myths and Hearsay

The first thing you usually hear of the negative side of Facebook is that “people spam my updates with so many pointless updates.” And the same for Twitter, as the prospect of being able to send updates about where you are/what you’re doing is an exciting one.

However, in light of these changes it’s not all doom and gloom.
In fact, in recent years many of these sites have added features to stop things like this happening and to reduce the amount of spam that you get, if any, and the ability to moderate your own comments etc.

Concerning spam- it happens, you can’t really get away from that, but on these sites there has been a great deal of time reducing the amount you receive. These days there’s much less than there was- and if you feel like someone is spamming you can simply remove them. If you find someone is eating up your Twitter feed with a continual pointless/uninteresting update then you can simply ignore that by not following them anymore.
Despite what some people will tell you, the internet is not a place where spam is as common as it used to be and it’s actually quite pleasant.

Concerning the numbers game- we all experience some people, sometimes, that just want to have as many friends as possible even if they don’t physically know them but again there’s a few ways to stop this happening. Privacy controls, for one. Blocking/reporting the user in question or taking them off of your list, for another.

Concerning privacy- there’s a lot of horror stories about ID theft on the internet and there’s even more stories about how someone found out something, from a page, on the internet, they were browsing. This is why privacy controls were invented!

Most, if not all, sites have these controls now and they can practically make you invisible for all intents and purposes. For example, on Facebook you can list yourself as omitted from the search. Even if they search for you by name, school, friends, interests or anything else they know about you- they’ll never find you.
Equally, you can set all of your updates to “Friends Only” meaning only those you’ve accepted requests from, or sent to, can see your updates. Although, setting yourself as nigh on impossible to find would be a bad idea for the purposes of networking but you can set your profile information to “Friends Only”. That way, people can still search you but they can’t read your

information unless you say they can.

Above all things, be sensible! They can’t take what isn’t there and if you don’t list everything about yourself from shoe size to last dental check up- they can’t see it.
Thereby the greatest lesson is to be ever vigilant with what you share, so that you share enough that people can find you but you’re not leaking inside information with people not privileged to view it.

Thank you for reading- as always!
We hope this has been an insightful look into social media and online networking.

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