Top 2012 Social Media Resolutions: Share Less, With Fewer People

Did 2011 mark the high point of oversharing? That seems to be the lesson behind a couple of studies that examined the New Year's resolutions of social media users.

Most of us, it seems, did make social media resolutions of some sort. In a Harris Interactive survey of 2,000 Americans who use services such as Facebook and Twitter, 63% of respondents said they had made promises to themselves regarding their use of such services in 2012. The survey was commissioned by social network Posterous.

Surprisingly few of those resolutions had anything to do with spending less time on those services. Only a quarter of respondents with a social media resolution checked the box marked "take a break from social media and spend more time interacting with people in real life." Rather, most users wanted to better control how much they share, and with whom.

The top two promises, chosen by 44% and 42% of resolution-makers respectively, were "share only with close friends and family" and "be more careful about what I share."

The desire for less sharing was evident on the incoming side, too. The third most popular resolution, shared by 37% of respondents: "Only read status updates from people who are close friends and family."

Sharing less on social media may not be the most popular New Year's resolution overall — it's hard to beat mainstays like "lose weight" or "save more money." But a separate study, an analysis of more than 152,000 tweets about New Years' resolutions by Crimson Hexagon, suggests that the social media diet resolution has reached the top tier.

Leaving aside the 20% of tweets that simply said New Year's resolutions were "lame," the resolution to "share less on social media" was the third most popular — beating "be kinder to others."

It's easy to surmise that we all shared too much last year — that one too many drunken photo got posted, or that an ill-considered joke on your Facebook wall led to a dicey conversation with the boss. But perhaps there's another lesson to be drawn here: that we're hungry for a more meaningful, more intimate form of social media.

Most users know the feeling: that Twitter's connections are too impersonal, that the majority of our Facebook friends are one-time acquaintances we'd rather not spill everything to. On the surface, that's good news for services like Posterous and Path, which make a virtue of their limited social circles. (It's also a boon for Google+, which touts its ability to divide your friends into various circles of sharing — though critics complain the Circles feature is still too complex for the average user.)

On the other hand, the resolution to share less — or to only share with family and close friends — doesn't necessarily suggest we're ready to give up on the twin behemoths of Twitter and Facebook just yet. After all, "switch my social network" was not a resolution that ranked in the Harris survey. Most of our world is on these big two services, and we recognize that. We would just like to be more careful about what we post there, and to whom.

Did you make a social media resolution for 2012? Let us know what it was in the comments.