Social media can sometimes be a curse. There are many social networking sites and some of them are owned by the same people. Some link to others, and some just drive you insane. I know that I used be frustrated quite a bit with how I used social media. You know what I did? I quit. That's right, I quit social media for about 6 months. During that six month time frame, I formulated a social media strategy, my own algorithm to use on social media basically. I had to test out my plan so I started a brand new Facebook account. Within six months I had over 3000 social friends from my college area, and it all started with one simple plan.

When I first restarted my Facebook, I added the people that I knew. This got me about to about 300 people. Then what I did is I searched for my college in the search bar and about once a week for 10 weeks I would sit down for several hours and I would go through hundreds of students sifting through their social media profiles to see which ones were active and which ones were just there to be there. I found one interesting thing. The most active users had the most up to date profiles. The active users profiles were fully filled out and the data was accurate. Next what I found is that of the 300 original friends, many of them were mutual friends with each other. What I did next was to invite people to be friends with me only if they were actively engaged, and if they had over 20 mutual friends with me.

I also found out that school groups created events on Facebook and that they would tag new students in those events. So off I went to those event pages and those group pages and I scoured the network for more people to invite. As time went on, I no longer had to worry about my friend list. People were adding me because I knew everyone else. And that is how I became successful at adding friends on Facebook.

Having a huge friend list is great, but it is not the end all be all. In fact, many people will lose friends faster than they got them if they share the wrong things. I found out that people typically don't like religious or political things. It's not that those things are bad, it's just that people get flooded with those types of things everyday and they go to social media for news and for something new. So I started creating something new. I followed content creators that gave me cool things that I knew I would be glad to share and that my followers would be glad to see. Creating a brand for yourself requires you to entice those viewers time and time again. And that is what I do. I share content that viewers love and often times share with others. I have created a brand for myself. People know I am the guy who is connected to everyone at school, and people also know that I love sharing what's new.

This same philosophy can be used on any platform. I like Facebook, but as time goes on i will branch out into other social platforms, and who knows, maybe I'll start my own platform one day.