Make more friends in college: Build your social circle exponentially faster

To make more friends, you have to understand how social dynamics work. After reading this post, you’ll start to see how a few simple changes can make you one of the best-known people on campus.

First of all, on average you have around 40 casual friends. After that, most people don’t make any more friends because they can’t handle more than that. However, in reality, most people only have enough time for 6-8 close friends. This constitutes the person’s core social group.

The types of friends you keep will seriously affect your ability to make more friends. First you need to know what a social connector is. The social connector is someone who is very well connected. They know everyone, and everyone knows them. They are not necessarily super rude high status people. They are simply very sociable, friendly people and very in tune with the social rhythm. If you want to make more friends on campus, it’s imperative that you make ALL of your 8 best connector friends. The difference will be HUGE.

Let’s look at a counterexample to drive you home. Let’s say you want to make more friends, but instead of having 8 social connector friends, you have 8 leeching friends. That is, they are not social, they are not high value, they can be negative or whatever. Most likely they will have a social reach of, say, 6 more people. So overall, you have a direct influence of only 48 people.

Can you imagine trying to throw a party when you can only get 48 people to show up? And that’s as long as they’re not busy and even want to introduce themselves. If you’ve got a lot of leech friends that aren’t high value, I bet her 6 friends aren’t dying to come over.

Now, let’s say you want to make more friends, and your 8 friends are social connectors. Let’s say each social connector is very well connected with 100 people. Now you have a direct influence with 800 people! Imagine throwing a party when you have such a big influence?

Throw a couple of jam-packed parties like this, and you won’t have to make any more friends—people will be fighting to get to know you.

If you are committed to making more friends and strengthening your social circle, keep an eye on your 8 closest friends. Make sure everyone is a social connector. Take advantage of your connections. Organize frequent social gatherings. You can be the organizer while they use their connector skills to attract people.