Ever wondered why some some friendships are fleeting while others last your entire lifetime? According to a recent study that involved 2 million people and 8 million phone conversations over the period of an entire year, the secret behind persistent relationships is reciprocity, or, the simple act of returning your friend’s call. It found out that the more often two friends called each other, the longer the period of their relationship’s continuance.
It has been common knowledge that some people are more adept as social animals, who are much more connected than others. The study also found these highly connected people are also more socially expressed in terms of the persistence or strength of their many connections.
Applying these findings to social media, if you happen to have a large network of online friends, it doesn’t mean that you have weaker ties with all of them. As the study says, the lifespan and depth of these relationships depends on one factor – connecting repeatedly over time.
Micro-blogging or life-streaming websites such as Twitter and Plurk give us the chance to meet and communicate with a large number of varied people from all around the world. This kind of communication is less personal, but no less legitimate than a real face-to-face meeting. The strength of these services is their ability to enable you to develop persistence in your online relationships, in a ultra-casual, completely non-invasive manner, gradually helping you build a network of people.
There are various ways to leverage the new social channels such as Twitter and Plurk, but what matters in the end is that they help you develop persistence in relationships that matter to you. The bottom line is, people market people! Now isn’t that a good enough reason to get you going?
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