Do you know how many friends you have on Facebook? Do you know all of these people or when was the last time you spoke to that person occasionally pops on your wall? How about when you see someone’s profile and they have over a thousand friends or more. Facebook has been around over ten years. In that time, you could have gone through high school, college, and through the first couple years of your first real job. Each of these phases you meet people and make new friends, and the first thing they do now is add you on Facebook. Truly, how many friends can you really have on Facebook before it is to many?

I once had over a thousand friends on Facebook, I didn’t even realize how many so called friends I had till I reached my junior year of college. My Facebook wall was constantly updating and then someone else would share their exciting news about how they saw the sunset like it was the first time ever. After talking to a few co-workers and finding out that I had the most “friends” on Facebook I made a change. I decided that I would go through and delete everyone that I haven’t talked to in over a year. After a while, I started to delete high school friends that I use to be very close with. I even started to delete people that I had in current classes in college, and family members that I met years ago at an awkward family gathering.

Once my Facebook purge was over I removed over eight hundred people. The feeling I got was really satisfying. There was the occasional why did you delete me off Facebook from old acquaintances that I would run into here and there. I was only after removing so many people I realized that keeping a smaller social circle on the site was helping my social life. Now when Facebook notifies me about someone’s birthday it is actually someone that I want to wish a Happy Birthday to. Before I had to search through the people to see if I was on talking terms with them, or if it would be weird if I randomly sent them a message. In my book, I think Facebook is more of a personal social media outlet whereas Twitter and Instagram are the places where you can have hundreds or thousands of followers that may see the things that I post.

Now when I am in a group of people talking about social media and having these conversations about how many followers, or friends we have I can proudly say that I have less than two hundred “friends”. However, the friends that I do have actually care about what I have to say and share on my profile. Limiting the number of friends, I have on Facebook actually have helped me stay off of it as much too, I get fewer notifications and have fewer updates on my newsfeed so can quickly catch up and get on with my life offline.