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Sorry if I go a bit off the track with this one. This is a question(or should I say, dilemma) about personal branding that's been bothering me for a while now. Just read an blog post by Monica O'Brien about "How to combine personal and professional online without pissing people off" and it got me wondering. Do you use your personal Facebook account to connect with both, personal and professional contacts? (Not your blog page's fan page).

I've started experimenting with this just lately. Before I used to keep my FB profile completely personal. This has changed now. Lately I've been getting friend requests from some interesting people I don't know through real life (haven't met them in person), but who I consider to be good business contacts. I've been quite picky and haven't approved every "friend request" though. I've created a "business contact" list where I add these people and made some restrictions on the things this list is able to see.

Have you merged your personal and professional life through facebook? What kind of experiences have you had with this? Would be interesting to hear your thoughts!

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4 Answers

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I'm on the same page as Thursday. I used to think of Facebook as a personal-only platform, and I created a separate "fan page" for my blog. At some point, I started receiving too many requests to connect with my personal profile and I started accepting them. Now I generally accept requests from anyone who I've interacted with elsewhere (email, twitter, etc.). I add people I don't know well to a limited access profile I created that doesn't let them see everything.

Now I just assume that everything I do online will be read by a mixed audience ("personal" and "professional" contacts). I think privacy online is so fragile that you have to be prepared for anyone to read anything you publish (including email). That's part of the reason I don't mind mixing the two worlds online anymore. It means some "personal" communications are probably watered-down, and some "professional" communications are spiced up. That's probably good for the professional world, and I just save my spiciest conversations for the telephone or in-person.

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I like the mixed audience mindset. It's probably the right way to look at this issue. Do you know if facebook still has a "friend limit"? Not that my amount of contacts would be anywhere near that! Just a curiosity. – Juha Liikala Jan 13 at 14:25
I think there's a 5000 friend limit for personal pages, but no limit for fan pages. – Corbett♦ Jan 13 at 23:03
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I'm generally pretty laid back about who I connect with on Facebook, mostly because I don't consider it my most important platform. As long as I know a person in some context (exchanged emails, met in person), I'll accept a friend request. I won't accept a request from someone I have never connected with elsewhere, however. (I will connect with unknown folks on both Twitter and LinkedIn, however).

I think that restricting what your business contacts can see makes sense, and simplifies the decision-making process. Since most of us share a lot of personal information on Facebook, accepting a friend request but not offering up full access makes a lot of sense.

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I started out on FB with the mixed audience mindset, branding yourself is key and where better to be truthful in your branding but on your personal/business fb page?

The reason I say this is because prospective business partners will see the "real" me, I cannot bs them when my family and friends know better and will chime in at any time to call my game (although that has never happened because I do not play games with my business). I honestly feel that people need the complete picture of who we are, I certainly do not use fb to post personal topics that need to stay within the family and off the internet!

I truly believe this combination is the winning combination to a successful online career!

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I'm in the same boat about Facebook. I've always used it for people I actually know, but have been adding people I interknow or deal with for business. I have a fan page for the blog that 3 people know about, but that isn't as easy to use just yet. I use lists within Facebook for blocking some information from people I only barely know or are business contacts of some sort.

I don't generally get too out of hand with the personal status updates, so I don't have a fear of scaring away potential contacts with references to Wookie mating rituals or the like. But there are some things I share with only close friends or family. Just not much through that medium. If it's real personal, it just gets communicated through an actually private channel.

Twitter and LinkedIn I use differently, though I only just started trying to grasp what can be done with LinkedIn and started using it.

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