5 Tips To Separate Personal And Professional Life Online
by Amber Mac, fastcompany.comMay 20th 2011
"My life and biz is so intertwined in every way that it's hard to make that clean separation on and offline." That's what Candace Alper (@NameYourTuneCDs) said on Twitter when I asked about the importance of separating your personal and business life on Facebook. As an entrepreneur who runs a made-to-order children's CD company, she is comfortable mixing business with pleasure online. Monica Roddey (@MicaR) agrees. She says "my online persona = my 'real life' persona ... what you see is what you get."
I fall into Alper's and Roddey's camp. When I signed up for Facebook years ago, I opened it up to anyone and everyone. Although I now also maintain a fan page, it's still hard for me to refuse friend invites that make their way into my personal account. However, the majority of the responses I received disagreed with this approach. Matt Hall (@mattwiter) writes that "you simply don't combine the two to begin with ... that is a sure mistake." For Kathy Dabrowska (@_katdee), she says "you can't be ON all the time ... you need a place where marketing yourself is not needed."
In theory I agree that separation is a good thing. With more employers lurking on social profiles and more people oversharing online, it just makes sense to keep some things private. However, the reality is that sometimes the tools make it difficult to split up your networks. Here are five tips to help you get closer.
1. Use different networks for different purposes
Jon Lax (@jonlax) uses LinkedIn for business and Facebook for personal. This seems to be a pretty safe and standard approach for a lot of people. After all, LinkedIn just doesn't lend itself to the more personal information that is expected on Facebook. If you do this, it's important to warn people in your professional life who are expecting to be accepted as a Facebook friend. In other words, let them know gently that LinkedIn is where your like to do business.
2. Create a Facebook personal profile AND brand page
Mike Frey is a fan of separation, so he maintains a private account and a company page. This way it's clear that the latter is for professional networking only. To create a public page simply go to the Pages section on Facebook. You have the option to create a page as a Business, Company, Public Figure, Brand, or Community Cause. One thing to note, until you have 25 fans you cannot get a custom URL for your page (an important part of your overall branding).
3. Push your business contacts to Twitter
Maury Estabrooks (@maurye) thinks using Twitter as a professional networking tool and Facebook for personal relationships is ideal. Since Twitter works best as a public forum, this is a solid approach. The only downside to this option is that your tweeting profile lacks the infrastructure to expand on your business information and history, so it's limited as a professional tool.
4. Tweak Facebook privacy settings
Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCat) believes that toying with your settings on the world's number one social network will help you to maintain separation. With these new-ish Facebook options you are able to decide which group of friends sees what. To do this go into your Privacy Settings and adjust the options within "Sharing on Facebook." This way you can adjust who can see what.
5. Take your private life offline altogether
As Chris McLachlin wrote me on Facebook, we have given up a lot of our privacy already. He mentions that everything we share is in the "public domain," so people might as well get used to it or limit what they say. Out of the above tips, I most closely agree with this statement. While I have a personal Facebook account, I never share any photos there that I wouldn't be comfortable showing publicly. I also refuse to broadcast my phone number or address with anyone, and I more or less just assume that privacy settings won't help me that much if someone in my network decides to breach my trust.
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Original Page: http://www.fastcompany.com/1754431/5-tips-to-separate-personal-professional-life-online
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