How to get ahead on Facebook

There’s no mystery to how to make the socialnetworking site work for you. You don’t need a lot of friends. You just need a lot of cash, says Megan McArdle

NOT long ago, I decided that it was time to finally get serious about my social-media presence. No, please don’t titter. While my fellow journalists had been building large followings on Facebook, I’d kept my page locked down, limited to people that I at least sort of knew IRL. Frankly, it was a bit of self-preservation: more than once I’ve inadvertently informed the 13,000 followers of my public Twitter account that I’d be somewhere for a drink around 6.30 if they’d like to stop by.

But with more than a third of traffic to many media sites coming through social media, peers solemnly assured me that as long as I didn’t have a public Facebook persona, I was not living up to my traffic potential.