The Friend Who Ignores Your Social Media Posts: A Listener Disagrees With My Take

And I Double Down

Hand with heart button Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

Dear Nina,

After catching up on earlier episodes of your podcast, I’m writing to say I strongly disagree with your take on the one about friends who ignore your social media posts. Your advice was to basically “get over it,” even though you didn’t use those words.

Interjection by Nina to summarize the episode:

In episode 5 of Dear Nina, “The Friend Who Ignores Your Social Media Posts,” guest, Rudri Patel, and I answered an email from someone who felt hurt by a friend who is pushing the thumbs up or heart on mutual friends’ posts, but not liking the emailer’s posts. It is probably fair to say that I ultimately suggested the letter writer “get over it.” As stated, those weren’t the words I used. I don’t speak that way to people who write to me.

Back to the letter:

I believe that true friends, knowing how important social media is to your business, would make a point to like your posts. I’m not saying they need to like every single post or even go as far as to (gasp!) actually share posts, but it would be nice if they would like *some.*

I have one friend in mind, “Teresa.”

Teresa has a coaching business (I’m purposely vague on the type of coaching for privacy) and posts often. Even though she generally ignores the posts for my business (also purposely vague), I “like” a lot of her stuff. I want to help her expand her reach and it’s easy enough to push the thumbs up.

It’s on the tip of my tongue every time I see her to say, “Can you do me a favor and like my posts? It would help me out a lot.” You and your guest suggested a line like that too as a possible course of action in the episode, but you both seemed squeamish about it. I think you, in particular, said you would likely never say that to anyone.

You both also agreed that as long as a friend is a good friend in other ways, this lack of reciprocity on social apps shouldn’t matter. But it’s such a glaring unevenness in the friendship. I support her endeavors and she doesn’t support mine. Simple as that. No way around it.

How do I look beyond all this? What if I can’t?

Thanks for talking about this topic a little further,

Corrie

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Hi Corrie,