In honor of Friends’ Day, Facebook recently posted an article on their research site discussing degrees of separation.
According to the research, the world is getting smaller.
“Each person in the world (at least among the 1.59 billion people active on Facebook) is connected to every other person by an average of three and a half other people,” according to the article. This is a substantial decrease in separation from a similar study conducted in 2011.
My personal average degrees of separation from everyone is 3.08, right up there with only 30M other users. This means, that to reach to almost anyone, I only need to go through three people.
What does this mean to sourcing?
- It means your personal network is larger than you realize.
- It means you should be using Facebook to source.
- It means if you’re not asking for referrals, you should start today!
Often times, we focus on online tools and searches to the point of ignoring our REAL network – the living breathing people that you celebrate holidays with or sit next to at your kid’s soccer games. What does your next door neighbor do for a living? Did you know that soccer mom is an engineer?
[clickToTweet tweet=”Don’t discount your personal connections when conducting searches.” quote=”Don’t discount your personal connections when conducting searches.”]
Kevin Bacon just got much, much closer.