Social Networks Are Not For Professional Networking

Frequently, people take the “Social Butterfly” approach, attempting to casually meet as many persons as possible as if to win the LinkedIn connections and Facebook friends “competition.” They do not spend time and make attempts to develop deeper relationships with select individuals on Social Networking sites.

For professional networking, social media may not be the best and effective approach. Its emphasis is on web of “friends” which does not translate into quality relationships for professional opportunities. 

Post Script (added on 07 Dec 2017):

The above post was made on Blogger, FaceBook, Wordpress and Linkedin.

It caught the attention of Rohit K Sharma‏ of IBM who follows all of my posts on LinkedIn quite carefully. I could not have ignored his comment. Rohit drew my attention to the research of Mark S. Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties" American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (May, 1973): 1360-1380. It is worthwhile to capture the essence of the discussion for enriching the above posting.

The article in question states that ‘weak ties’ can provide information. Strength of ties was articulated as an Intuitive probable notion comprising of 4 dimensions/parameters that the author conjectured to be highly inter-correlated. He had left the notion to be subjected to analytical proof for later work. Thus, he worked on only the first of the four dimensions and used anecdotal data to draw a conjecture.

I also referred to subsequent work, Mark Granovetter: “The Impact of Social Structure on Economic Outcomes” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter, 2005), pp. 33-50. On page 34 he writes, 

          “2) The Strength of Weak Ties. More novel information flows to individuals through weak than through strong ties. Because our close friends tend to move in the same circles that we do, the information they receive overlaps considerably with what we already know. Acquaintances, by contrast, know people that we do not and, thus, receive more novel information. This outcome arises in part because our acquaintances are typically less similar to us than close friends, and in part because they spend less time with us. Moving in different circles from ours, they connect us to a wider world. They may therefore be better sources when we need to go beyond what our own group knows, as in finding a new job or obtaining a scarce service. This is so even though close friends may be more interested than acquaintances in helping us; social structure can dominate motivation. This is one aspect of what I have called "the strength of weak ties" (Granovetter, 1973, 1983).”

As an interesting follow up to the 1973 article, I found an interesting debate: “Gans on Granovetter’s “Strength of Weak Ties” in the same The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 80, No. 2, (Sep. 1974), pp. 524-527.

Information about an opportunity is a precursor to availing it but information is not the opportunity by itself; more particularly; in today’s information overloaded world as in contrast to the information hungry world of 1973 when Mark Granovetter wrote his article. Networks do not have a head or a tail. They do not even have a centre. This applies to both social networks and professional networks. Professional Networks however, have stratification and loose hierarchies of sub-networks.

The conclusion that can be drawn is that social networks may provide information about professional opportunities but that is in no way a negation of my position on the inadequacy of social networks to offer quality relationships for professional opportunities.