1. Update Your Status About Mundane Activities
It’s seriously great to know that you just pigged out on a half pound filet mignon but unless you are giving context to your experience, your friends probably don’t care. Status updates were not made to let your friends know about the fact that you are standing on an elevator, or even on a boat! If you’re going to take the time to enter your status, at least take the time to be a bit creative with it. While it may be cathartic to let people know about the horrendous service you just got, it really doesn’t provide much value, so just quit it!
2. Keep On Poking Away
What the hell is a poke? I think we all know what it means to poke people. You are trying to flirt but if you keep it up, it shifts from funny to annoying. When was the last time that something positive came out of walking up to someone in a bar and beginning to poke them until they responded? If you can successfully turn a poke into a lasting relationship then you are truly a master of manipulation because most people would find it flat out annoying.
On Facebook, poking wars can be fun at first but there’s an unspoken threshold that can be surpassed. Don’t surpass it if you don’t want to piss off your Facebook friends.
3. Sharing Your Quiz Results
It’s great to know that you are destined to be a “True New Yorker”, but do all of your friends really need to hear about it? There are thousands of entertaining quizzes on Facebook but keep the entertainment to yourself rather than share the insignificant results with your friends. While you may be good in bed, do you really need a quiz to tell you that? Also, do your friends really want to know about the most private details of your life as described through quiz results? Probably not.
4. Invite Your Friends To Some Sort Of Battle
There are tens of thousands of applications on Facebook and while there are plenty of games that are fun to play, not all of your friends are interested in joining you in a battle on Mafia Wars. Yeah, all those invites will quickly result in your friends removing you from their Facebook contacts. Don’t believe me? Keep on sending those Farm Town invites to all your friends and see what happens. Seriously, when you’re clicking on all your friends to invite them to the next game you are playing because you think it will boost your score. The only thing you’re going to end up accomplishing is annoying the hell out of your friends.
5. Reply To Broadcast Messages
You’ve seen it before: one of your friends sends out a broadcast message to update their friends about an event and then suddenly a threaded conversation erupts. We know that you’ve probably been too busy to catch up with many of your friends recently but don’t take mass messages as the opportunity to reconnect. You’re flooding everybody’s inbox with information that isn’t relevant to them and it’s flat out annoying!
6. Tag Your Friends In Unattractive Photos
Not everybody can look attractive from every angle but that doesn’t mean you should take this opportunity to highlight the angle that doesn’t work. Even worse is that you continue to tag everybody else that’s in the unattractive photo so that it can be circulated among all our friends. If you want to quickly damage your relationship, go find the most unattractive photo of your friend and tag them in it. Don’t be surprised when you end up unfriended for doing it!
7. Friend People Who Hated You In High School
While this one isn’t going to damage your existing relationships, it’s just bad form. Remember those people that you hated back in high school? They were part of the inspiration behind becoming successful yet for some reason they now want to reconnect years later. Personally, I don’t really mind since I don’t have any unforgivable experiences but most people are not going to friend you after you put them through years of torture. If you were a jerk, don’t expect to become mister (or miss) popular now that we’ve all grown up.
Are there any other Facebook etiquette tips that I’ve missed here?
