Why to NOT Meet Girls on Facebook

In the post on indirect game, Franco comments, in part:

“Maintaining a good personal Facebook or Social Networking appearance. I think this would require a blog post (or maybe even a series of blog posts), but interacting with women on Facebook (whether directly or indirectly through posts/pictures) is a big part of the way individuals connect and socialize with each other today. Do you have knowledge or advice in this area?”

If you're under 30 (or maybe even OVER 30, too) and you're living in the early 21st century, you've probably thought about how great it'd be if you could just meet girls on Facebook.

I mean... you can browse through profiles... pick the HOTTEST girls you see... send them a message... and then, if they write BACK - suddenly now you've got a new potential girlfriend or lover!

It's easy!

In a digital age, what better way is there to meet girls for the technically-inclined than to just find them on the Internet and send them a message? I've done it myself - and I'll be the first to tell you, I've met a few gorgeous women off of Facebook.

It works!

But there's one thing all the posts, articles, teachers, and guides that propose to teach you how to find girls on Facebook don't cover... and that is that it's way more work than meeting girls in real life, your odds of success are way lower, and it takes way more time.

Let me take you through my own personal adventures with Facebook - and why I ultimately decided to close my account and never log on again.

Back when Facebook was new, it became a craze... I was in college, and EVERYBODY in college was on Facebook! I had three things working against me being an early adopter personally, though:

• I've always been slow to adopt things

• I've always been skeptical about things that "everyone" is doing

• At the time, I didn't have my social skills down yet... and didn't have friends to push me onto the site (just classmates and casual acquaintances who'd bug me periodically about getting on there)

So, I brushed off the people who wanted me to get Facebook, and didn't bother until a few years after it'd been out.

But once I did finally get an account... I fell in love!

Finally, I could reconnect with all those old high school classmates and show them how cool I was!

I could connect with those hot girls I liked in college I never got together with, and show them how many hot girls were around me now!

I could connect with all the new people I was meeting, and give them access to my travel photos and let them see the exotic locales I was visiting!

I built up a really cool, really happening Facebook account, with tons of photos of me with beautiful, scantily clad women, tons of photos of me on travel in faraway lands, and tons of witty, memorable status updates that got tons of admiring comments.

I even started getting people talking to me about my Facebook in real life... "I've always got to check through this man's Facebook and see what kind of crazy things he's been up to," men would say about my profile in front of others.

"I took one look at your Facebook and I knew you were trouble," girls would say to me in turned-on tones after we'd slept together and they couldn't wrestle me into a relationship... (and then they'd ask me if we could please see each other one more time).

I met beautiful women through Facebook - girls with model looks, with incredible breasts, and tiny waists... girls I couldn't even find in real life at the time, let alone get together with. And we'd go on dates, and some of them I'd even take to bed.

It was wonderful! It was amazing!

And yet, I kept trying to pry myself off of there.

I'd come back to it again and again... "I've got to get off Facebook," I'd think to myself. Then I'd realize what nonsense that was, and how many good things Facebook brought to my life.

But one day, a year after these thoughts first began occurring to me, I took the time to sit down and ask myself why if Facebook was such a boon I kept wanting to close it out.

And then I realized why.

Getting an Edge

When you go to meet girls on Facebook, the first thing to realize is it's a lot like meeting girls on any other kind of online dating platform.

And the thing about meeting women online is... looks are king.

I'm a reasonably good-looking guy, or so I'm told... but even for me, even with incredible messages, online dating was often a crapshoot. I've gotten good results from it over the years, and I've tested hundreds of variations on messages, profile designs, and the like... and the one thing that ups results better than anything else you can possibly do in online dating is getting a better picture.

I started out by testing pictures on HotOrNot.com to see which ones got the best ratings. I just checked, and it looks like it's turned completely into a dating site these days, but HotOrNot used to be a ratings site where you could post your pictures... and other people would rate how hot (or not) you were.

So, I put a bunch of pictures of myself up there... and they all came back with 5, 6, or, if I was really lucky, 7.

Finally, I had a great picture of me sitting on a mountaintop overlooking Machu Picchu in Peru, bright green grass and gray stony ruins below and behind me, and that one garnered me an 8.5. I started using that on Facebook and on online dating sites, and I got better results.

Over the next year and a half or so, I only dabbled in online dating, and then I lost 20 pounds, upgraded my fashion, got a $60 haircut from the best fashion salon in town, and had some professional pictures done - and then I tested these on HotOrNot. Results? 9.2... 9.7... 9.9... 10.

I had a winner.

I put my best picture up, and my results with online went up markedly.

But then I ran a test.

The Trouble with Facebook

I went on ModelMayhem.com, and found a picture of a really cool-looking, attractive guy, duplicated my profile on an online dating website, and changed only one thing - the pictures. And guess what?

That profile got FLOODED with women saying hello, asking for dates, and sending their phone numbers in their VERY FIRST MESSAGE!

I couldn't believe the difference... it was my same profile! Everything was the same, except the pictures! So much for my "10" picture... apparently, it wasn't in the same league as this guy's 10.

Women never messaged me first. But this guy... he was a champ.

I almost shot a message to the guy on Model Mayhem to tell him, "Hey brother, I've got about a hundred women here that want to meet you in Southern California if you're interested. FYI. You'll just have to go by the name 'Simon,' is all."

So, over the course of 4 years of using Facebook and online dating to meet women, I discovered that there are exactly three (3) things that most impact your success rates:

1. Looks
2. Looks
3. Looks

Oh, I almost forgot, there's a fourth one too... looks!

Now, looks are under your control to a degree. You can:

• Lose weight
• Get a better haircut
• Get a cool facial hair style
• Upgrade your fashion
• Get professional pictures done
• Get ripped abs and show these off (it helps)
• Don't make eye contact with the camera (look down and away)
  
• Don't smile
  

Those last three tips are from OkCupid's blog, which has a number of fascinating analyses of the data from across its sites. And I used every single tip from that list above except the one on abs (still working on that, actually), and it did make a big difference in my online dating and Facebook success...

... but it was still nothing like Simon's.

This isn't the only problem with Facebook, though.

In addition to the looks problem, that you can improve quite a bit on but still never lap a guy who's just really good looking (unlike in real life, where looks are still important but a number of other things like social grace and leadership play much larger roles than they do on a computer), Facebook's got a few more strikes against it as a dating platform:

• It functions as a "high school environment" - basically, everything's about your social status on Facebook and about being "cool"

• It's not a pure dating platform - which means women are a lot less open to being picked up on Facebook than on, say, Plenty of Fish, or Ok Cupid

• There are a MILLION things competing for a woman's attention on Facebook... like her friend Stephanie's recent dramatic break up, or that weird guy Carl who keeps sending her stalkery messages - it can be nearly impossible to break through

• ... and worst of all, everything you build on Facebook fails to translate to real life

What I mean by that last one is this: Facebook game is decidedly different from real life game. If you get good at meeting girls in bars or parties, for instance, you'll have a much easier time meeting girls in class or at work. Or if you get good running street game, you'll find that beach pickup is a snap to learn.

But if you spend a year getting really, really good at posting amazing Facebook pictures and incredible status updates and cultivating a burgeoning online presence there, you'll have gotten no better at meeting girls anywhere other than Facebook.

Period.

And if you think building yourself up as a Facebook one-trick pony is a good investment, you might not have noticed the subtle shift in Facebook's demographics, with the trend makers more and more abandoning it, and only the late-comers and older folks adopting it in droves.

Facebook's hair is graying, and its style is running out.

There are, essentially, 3 recipes available to you if you want to meet girls on Facebook:

1. Be exceptionally good-looking, and get professional pictures

2. Get exceptionally ripped, and show off your abs

3. Work really, really, really hard to build an amazing profile, turn your real life into a Facebook photo accumulation effort, learn to write exactly the kind of status updates that attract scads and scads of likes and comments, and get amazing at messaging girls

I get called "handsome" sometimes, but I'm not #1. And I've been working out since I was a teenager and I still don't have #2, which means it's probably never going to happen.

So for me, the only choice was #3, and because I'm a game enthusiast and essentially wanted to make sure I tapped every channel that was conceivably available to me, I did.

It was a LOT of work.

Way more work to get any one girl off Facebook than it was to get an equivalent girl in real life. Like, way more.

What's worse is it makes you lazy. You meet a girl, and instead of pushing things forward with her, you think, "Oh, wait... I've got this KILLER Facebook profile. That means I don't HAVE to push things forward with her - I'll just get her on my Facebook, and then it'll be over! I won't even have to do any work!"

So you trade Facebooks with her, and then... usually you never see her again.

The few times you do see the girl again though, you chalk it up to Facebook.

"Ah, my Facebook profile comes through again," you think.

But did it? Was it your amazing Facebook profile that pushed you over the hump with this girl? Sure, she commented on it... but the truth is, the girls you get who liked your Facebook probably liked you already.

It's just throwing another step in the funnel, and every step you add to a funnel reduces the percentage of women who make it to the end of the funnel (your bedroom).

Here's what I know:

• Those people you connect with from high school are living a completely different life from you now (unless you're in a really small town) and you will never actually interact with them in real life again. So who cares if they think you're Internet cool?

• Those hot girls you connect with from college are off doing their jobs, hanging out with their friends, and dating their boyfriends. They don't really care how cool your profile is, and you're probably not going to meet them. You had plenty of shots with them in college... if it was going to happen, it would've happened.

• Those new people you're meeting whom you want to impress? They'll be a lot more impressed if you do it in person than over Facebook.

• Those new women you're meeting that you want to make headway with? You'll be a lot more likely to take girls to bed if you push things forward with them when you're in person with them, than if you refer them to your Facebook page and hope it pushes the right buttons for them.

• Those mega hotties you meet via Facebook? You can meet way more of them in a way shorter amount of time with way less work in real life via day game. And, you'll have a lot less competition (other guys doing the exact same thing you are to try to get them) on the street than you will in her Facebook inbox trying to nudge aside 100 other suitors.

Once I realized these things, and realized how much I was shooting myself in the foot with girls I was meeting by referring them to my Facebook, and how much I was sabotaging my efforts to get girls by changing my outings into Facebook photo collection safaris instead of "pick up a girl and take her home" missions where I held myself accountable for actual results instead of patting myself on the back for netting 10 great pictures and 5 new hot Facebook friends, I knew what I had to do: I shut my Facebook account down.

And you know what happened after that?

Immediately, I started getting better with girls again by leaps and bounds, and I saw an instant uptick in the number of phone numbers, dates, kisses, and new lovers I took.

But What About My Friends?

Whenever I have someone ask me how to meet girls on Facebook and I tell them don't meet girls on Facebook... in fact, don't be on there at all, they crack, put on a plaintive tone, and say, "But what about my FRIENDS? All my FRIENDS are on Facebook!"

Aside from thinking of Facebook as just one more resource to get girls off of, this was the other thing I struggled with for the year that I wanted to leave Facebook but just... couldn't.

I'd spent all that time reconnecting with people and building this profile... now I was just going to - what? Throw it all away?

Something began to dawn on me, though. All my real friends had my phone number or email address.

They could always just CALL me! Or write me!

And I realized my real friends almost never visited my Facebook page. In fact, most of my real life friends never saw my last Facebook status update that I was leaving Facebook, and most of them didn't even realize I wasn't on there anymore until I told them, sometimes months later.

So who were all these people hanging out on my Facebook page?

They were voyeurs. People I didn't communicate with anymore through any other channels. Randoms I'd met in a bar somewhere in some town I'd probably never go to again. Classmates from high school and college living vicariously through me, the guy who'd broken out of the mold and was off living some eccentric wild man's life in California and Europe and Asia and every what where else. Former colleagues dropping by to say happy birthday who never wrote me any other time of the year and probably wouldn't have gone out for a drink with me even if I'd come back to town and given them a week's notice.

They weren't real friends. It was all an illusion.

A shallow ego-boost. Mark Zuckerberg's goal with Facebook is to "connect everyone in the world," but the connections built aren't real connections... it's not sharing a beer with your pal at the local bar, or taking some beautiful girl you just met home and making love to her, or shooting an email to your old pal you haven't spoken to in years to let him know how things have been going for you.

It's just... empty posturing. And they aren't your friends.

I put my email address on Facebook before I left. I said, if you want to get in touch with me, if we're friends in real life and not just online, shoot me an email sometime and let me know how things are going with you, and I'll write back and let you know how things are going with me, and let's really be friends.

Nobody who commented on that last status update of mine to beg me not to go or to say they were sorry to see me leaving ever did.

But I Really Want to Meet Girls on Facebook... Can You Tell Me HOW?!?

Chances are if you're on this site, you're a skeptic like me... you don't really believe anything anybody tells you until you've taken it for a spin yourself.

So if you're reading this and saying, "This Chase Amante guy is too down on Facebook... I think *I* can make it work!" don't let me stop you. In fact, it's the attitude you should have - if you don't try everything out, you won't ever really know for sure whether it really isn't as solid a channel for meeting girls as something else, or if you just got fed incorrect, biased information.

That in mind, let me share with you a few of the tips I accumulated over a few years of tweaking and testing my Facebook profile to help me get girls through it:

1. A few GREAT pictures are better than a LOT of mediocre ones. Most guys who try to find girls on Facebook I see post tons and tons and tons of pictures. I did this at first too. After all, if you want to be popular on Facebook, you want to showcase as much of your life as possible, right?
   

   Actually, the Internet leads to some pretty harsh judging based off only a few pictures. If you've got 10 pictures up, and you look dead sexy in 5 of them, but ordinary in the other 5, she's going to go back and forth between, "Eh... he looks so hot in this one... but so meh in THIS one! I can't remember if I really LIKE him or not! Oh well... it's probably somewhere in the middle."
   

   Whereas if you only have the 5 pictures of you looking like a really sexy man in them up, you make it a lot easier for a girl to browse through your pictures and say, "Whoa, WHY am I not talking to him right now? Time to send him a message."
   

   You don't need a lot of pictures on Facebook. In fact, even if you've only got 6 or 7, if they're all really good you've instantly out-classed that guy with 4,000 pictures of his awesome party life in which he looks great in 600 of and ordinary or worse in 3,400 of.
   

2. Don't try and be "top of mind." Always being on people's news feeds is not an attractive trait... it just makes it look like Facebook is your LIFE. It's much better to be the guy who DOESN'T keep popping up on her friend feed, and whom she either:
   

1. Stumbles on in her friend page and thinks, "Oh yeah, HE was cute... how come I never hear anything from him? What's he up to these days?" or

2. You reach out to out of the blue and she thinks that when she sees your message

Just like in real life, it's a rookie mistake to throw all your value up so it's clear as day... a woman just assumes she knows everything about you, feels satisfied, and totally forgets about you, even if your life is wild or eccentric.

But if she has no idea what's going on with you because you hardly post any updates... now she's intrigued.

3. Keep your profile minimal. I don't know how this works in the age of timelines - timelines weren't introduced until some time after I'd removed my personal account, and I only briefly played around with it with the business's account here before taking that one down too - but back with the old profiles, you could have all kinds of stuff on them - group affiliations, things you liked, wall posts, status updates... the works. I nixed ALL that stuff.

   Those things are all distractions that pull the girl away from your photos and satisfy her curiosity about you. If there's nothing but a few great pictures, a couple of status updates, and an otherwise blank profile, she can't slake her curiosity about you, and it'll anywhere from bug her a bit to drive her crazy until she talks to you. The fewer things you have on your profile, the more likely you are to get girls talking to you... rather than get girls being overwhelmed by the unmanly accumulation of lots of pointless Internet "stuff" on your profile (chicks do this. Men should NEVER do this).

4. Keep your messages BRIEF. It's come to my attention that Facebook severely restricts your ability to message people you don't know these days, so I don't know how you go about meeting new girls on Facebook... I can't help there. In my day, I'd just mass-message every beautiful girl in a 40-mile radius and see what I got back.
   

   What I CAN tell you is that writing long online messages is a kiss of DEATH with ANY girl on Facebook, whether you know her or not. If you've got more than two short paragraphs, or three really short paragraphs, in any one message, go back and revise it because you're probably not going to get a response. And even if you do get a response, she probably won't want to meet up with you now because you're chasing too hard.
   

   Want to meet her in real life and be something other than Internet pals? Keep it short, keep it brief, and get to the point (meeting up with her for food or a drink) in the first message, where possible - don't beat around the bush - keep the focus on setting up logistics. She knows that's why you're contacting her, anyway. Be a strong dude and just spit it out.

5. Leave chat off - permanently. How many times have you sat there on chat waiting for that really hot girl to join, and being disappointed that she never does?
   

   Yeah, that's because the prettiest, most in-demand girls, and the coolest, most in-demand guys, don't use chat. You shouldn't either. It'll waste your time, and set you firmly in "guy who hangs out on Facebook all day and doesn't have much going on in his life" territory.
   

   If you want to talk to a girl, send her a message, don't stake her out in chat hoping she pops online so you can ambush her. Chicks don't dig that, trust me.
   

   Or, even better than sending her a message - ask her out in real life. Women appreciate that a lot more than getting a Facebook message to the same effect.
   

If you do all these things, there's an added bonus there, too - you limit your tendency to go to extremes (as I did) and turn your life into an extension of your Facebook profile.

You may be able to turn Facebook into an effective channel for meeting new women. I used it to that effect, but it was a lot of work, and I found other channels (nightclubs, street, parties, other forms of online dating, even social circle, which I normally avoid due to its limitations) more efficient ways to get the same or better caliber girls than I got via Facebook.

Still, if I have one recommendation for you, it's that you not meet girls on Facebook - devote your time, energy, and resources to other forms of game instead, that produce more for your efforts, and translate a lot better into other spheres of pickup, too.

But I won't begrudge you if you don't listen.

After all... I never listen either.

Ciao,
Chase

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UPDATE: perhaps one more reason to consider closing your Facebook account - science says it's bad for you, with findings that Facebook use negatively predicts happiness levels, with higher Facebook use precipitating declining life satisfaction levels (while I'm not convinced this is cause rather than correlation, regardless, if you're using Facebook more, you're increasingly unhappy).