Friends & Frenemies: Why We Add and Remove Facebook Friends
To friend or to de-friend, that is the question. New research from NM Incite, a Nielsen McKinsey company, reveals that there are innumerable factors that help Facebook users decide to add a friend or cull someone from the fold …
Context & Ripple Effects
By late 2011 the question of what a Facebook 'friend' actually means has been debated for years — TechCrunch asked what friendship means on the platform back in December 2008, and the New York Times profiled users who defriended Facebook entirely to deal with social-media obsession in 2009. What NM Incite adds is measurement: a Nielsen McKinsey study cataloguing the specific factors behind adding and removing friends, turning anecdote into data.
The timing matters inside Facebook too. The company has just rolled out Timeline worldwide and brought it to mobile, putting each user's full friend history on display, while its "Not Now" option for friend requests already shows the platform softening the binary add-or-ignore choice.
First-order effects
- Nielsen McKinsey gains a branded research franchise at the moment brands are deciding how much to invest in Facebook marketing, with NM Incite positioned as the interpreter of user friending behavior.
- Facebook's friend graph comes under fresh scrutiny just as Timeline makes every past connection visible on a user's profile, raising the stakes of who stays in the list.
Second-order effects
- Product design pressure points toward graduated controls rather than the blunt friend/unfriend switch — the "Not Now" feature is an early template for letting users defer and filter relationships without confrontation.
- Marketers and page admins, who just gained private messaging with fans, get a new dataset for judging how genuine a brand's fan base is versus its friend-style connections.
Third-order effects
- If curation keeps intensifying, the industry-wide pattern bends away from symmetric friendship toward asymmetric audience management, where users control who sees what rather than who counts as a connection.
- Research firms like Nielsen McKinsey establish a recurring business layer around quantifying social behavior, making friending and unfriending metrics a sellable commodity alongside ad targeting.
The trend: Social networks are drifting from binary friend ties toward granular audience controls, with measurement firms racing to quantify how users curate their connections.