Take it easy with your Facebook pics, lest your real-life relationships suffer, a new British study suggests.
Sharing too many photos on social media can damage those relationships, according to the study by researchers at four universities in the United Kingdom.
"It’s worth remembering that the information we post to our ‘friends’ on Facebook, actually gets viewed by lots of different categories of people," said lead researcher David Houghton, a lecturer at the University of Birmingham Business School. "Each group seems to take a different view of the information shared."
For partners in relationships, sharing more pictures of events or of family was accompanied by a rise in intimacy in their relationship, according to the study. But partners who shared more photographs of their friends saw their intimacy drop in their relationship, the researchers found.
The same was true for people's close friendships: Posting too many photos of friends garnered a user less support from their close friend, and that close friendship could suffer.
The solution, according to the study's authors? "Some form of information control," they said.
That could mean posting fewer photos, getting choosier about whom you friend, adjusting your privacy settings or creating friend groups with different access to your photos.
Read the study here.
Photo Credit: NBC10.com