It appears impressive to have a high number of contacts on your lists. You appear extremely attractive if you have over 3,000 Facebook friends, or LinkedIn connections. You must be doing something right if you have that many contacts on your list. However, you need to step aside from that for a few moments and ask yourself honestly how many of those contacts are going to be of use to you? I know that may sound a bit cold, however the reality is a large portion of your connections or friends are just taking up space. Do they ever communicate with you? Even just once in a blue Moon? Do they engage with you after you put out content? Do you believe that there is potential for any kind of relationship with any of them down the road? Unless you have a very small number of connections of close friends on your lists, I can guarantee that there is a portion of those friends that are in your networks that do not serve any of those purposes. In that case, you need to let them go.
It does not matter what season it is, however once every 3 months you really need to do a spring cleaning when it comes to your Facebook friends list especially. If you have a large network, you will need to set aside time and do the cleaning over a few days, or a week. You obviously will keep the contacts that you engage with. However, if you see a contact that you don’t have much to do with, ask yourself what the benefits are if that individual were to remain as a contact. Could this person be someone of value down the road? Or does this person have access to something that you will need? If you cannot find any reasons to keep that person on your list, then it is best to remove him/her. And keep repeating the process until you are done. If you are following that individual on other networks like Twitter or Google Plus, you will want to unfollow him/her as well. Remember that it is better if you have more of a following on these networks than you having followers. You would not want to follow someone who you have removed as a connection on Facebook. That would be awkward. Remember, if any of them come back to you and ask why you had removed them from your networks, be honest and tell them that you never engaged much with them and wanted to keep your networks filled with contacts who you are going to develop relationships with. If they show a genuine interest in interacting with you, you can always add them back.
The purpose of this action is not to be mean or anything of that nature. You need to do a spring cleaning every now and then so you can make room for new connections that will be of great value to you. As I said before, it appears impressive to have a large connection on your networks. However, make those connections as meaningful as you possibly can.