02 May 2 Practical Ways to Ensure You’re Not Mixing Business & Personal on Facebook
Facebook is a valuable tool both professionally and personally. Are you sharing too much personal information with your business network? Do you know how to keep them separate? Are you worried about what your clients might inadvertently see when interacting with you online?
Well, the obvious answer is if you don’t want others to see it, don’t post it!! Forget “All the World’s a Stage”… Facebook and the Internet represent the open book of your life to friends, family, and potential clients or customers.
Realistically, you have things you want to share with your personal network about your children, vacation, and sometimes even what you had for lunch! We highly recommend you keep your personal and business Facebook interactions completely separate.
There are two ways to do this:
Create a business page.
Invite relevant (and ONLY relevant) friends to join this page. You can even announce to any business contacts associated with your personal page that you are moving all business conversations and connections to this new page and invite them to be one of the first.
Keep your updates to both your profile and your business page completely separate. Your friends don’t want to hear about your newest clients, advice in your field, or “shop talk”, and your clients don’t want to hear about what your son just accidentally swallowed.
If you’re not quite ready for a business page, there is another option for you to keep your networks separate within your personal page.
Create a Facebook Friends list.
This will allow you to dictate which of your friends can see only certain information, such as videos and photos.
To set up a list, click “Account” and then select “Edit Friends” from the drop down list.
Near the top middle of the page, click “Create List”. A new window will appear showing all of your friends.
Type a name for your list (e.g., “Business Friends”) and select the friends you want on that list. When you have finished your friend selection click “Create List”.
Now you must customize your settings so you can dictate what this new list is permitted to see on your page. Go back up to the top right of the page and click “Account” and then select “Privacy Settings”.
On the privacy settings page, select “Custom Settings”. On this page there is a list of settings on information you share, and what your friends share.
Choose an option that you want to exclude your new list from. Click on your current setting and a drop down list appears. Select “Customize”.
When clicked a new window will appear with which you can edit your current privacy settings for that option and set up an exclude option. Type in the name of your new list you want to exclude from this content. Don’t forget to save!
You have now excluded those friends from seeing that content. Repeat this process to exclude your list from any of the content features on Facebook.
If this sounds like too much work, Idea Associates can help you create a custom Business Page so you don’t have to worry about lists and privacy settings!
