Not to hate on people with a large number of following, because I have quite a few myself, but apparently you cannot maintain a good relationship outside 150 people. Yes, this has been covered in the Mashable article Your Brain Can’t Handle Your Facebook Friends.

Where did the number of 150 come from? It is from Dunbar’s number. Dunbar’s number, according to Wikipedia:

Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.

This number was figured by an anthropologist from the United Kingdom named Robin Dunbar.

So, what about those people with hundreds of thousands of followers? Is it meaningless? Are they laughing stocks on the social networks? Not necessarily. It would become meaningless if the person had nothing to say or even try to connect with their followers. Not every single one of those people will engage in conversation right away and most people are certain that if you have a lot of followers, you might be a busy person. And truthfully, from experience, it is not that hard to connect with others. I find it easy because I connect with different people all the time. Some I have come to catch online and connect with more than a dozen times.

Dubar’s number is for solid in person connections that you can maintain at the same time. AND the Internet was not even public in 1992 when Dunbar conducted this policy. So, maybe this a theory that no longer pertains to society today?

What are your thoughts?

Related posts:

1. Are Numbers of Followers Important?
2. You Can Own Your Followers: Buytter.com
3. What Makes A Person An Expert in Social Media?