Do you wish people for their birthdays on FB? This is what you should be doing.

This post aims to help you at nurturing relationships and connections on Facebook, though only a tiny notch more. And we’ll keep it very short.

So since times immemorial, birthdays of your friends have been made visible to you by Facebook on top right of your home page, during the whole of their respective big days. (By the way, I am still to figure out why people have been needing a special app for this and furthermore sending spammy invites to their friends over it.) You might also be knowing that, if the birthday-boy has allowed for his friends or other people to post on his wall (which IS the default option), if you click on the birthday reminder, out pops a field where you can see ‘Write a birthday wish on his timeline…’ You click in the field. Type in a quick ‘Happy Birthday mate!’ and poof.

Here’s what I suggest
Next time, click on your friend’s name besides that empty field. And as you visit their profile page, click on message and type in a message and if you can, use an emoticon to make your wish look more personal.

Why you should do it?
There are going to hundreds of their friends who would be wishing them on their timeline. Yes, they would get a notification for the wishes from each of the friends of course. But a month or six months hence, are they going to remember? Even their timeline is going to club all the wishes together and put a boasting ‘ABC, XYZ and 348 others wished you on your birthday’ after a short while.
The reason why message does it better, is that it stores the communication that had taken place. And whenever the next time you want to have a talk with them (might be the case that you would want to ask them a favor or there’s something you need to know from them), their eyes scan up the message box innately to look up the last conversation that had taken place, to know where you two had left off. This is an activity we all unconsciously do to gain context.
And there they are reminded that you had taken the effort (no matter how small) it takes to personally wish them on their big day! Now as you have your little edge and some positiveness from their side already, I hope we have just tweaked the likeliness of your conversation to go better!