Be careful who you ‘friend’!
You need to build your social media up and get masses of fans so that you can impress the record companies, show your friends that you’re popular and impress the pet dog too so you go to all sorts of lengths to publicise your facebook page and your twitter account and slowly the likes go up and you start to get private messages. It’s really exciting because you get fans from all over the world who want to talk to you and some get quite upset if you don’t reply!
Many will ask if you’ll ‘friend’ them on facebook and too often we see this line being crossed with young artists who seem to have a friend list of 1000s (seriously, who has that many friends??) and an official page with about 200 likes, because it’s really not as cool to follow the main page when you can actually have a friend as a pop star!
But take heed and consider what you are doing. That hot same-aged boy/girl (delete as appropriate) may not actually be real. It could be an adult and that adult can now see all of your photos AND potentially all of your friends’ photos and find out about where you live, what you do etc. Situations can occur where not only does the artist have someone listed as a ‘friend’ but that ‘friend’ then ‘friends’ a friend of the artist and it shows ‘you have a mutual friend in common’ so they accept and the cycle continues.
Even if we consider someone who isn’t an adult, think about what you post on your wall – do you want that appearing in publicity later on in your career because you allowed a stranger access?!
So the moral of this story is…keep your personal space private. Change your profile name so that nobody can find you except your real friends and direct everyone to your main page. They can private message you there, so no need for them to feel left out. And keep a personal and a private twitter account to protect yourself.
Finally, remember that everything you put online could be there forever and what’s online has lost a lot of people their job and their livelihood. Don’t let that be you!
