Managing Your "Private" Life on Facebook While Developing Business

I'm witnessing an increase in the number of people creating "extra" accounts on Facebook to help them manage (separate) business and private personas.

This might seem like a good way to manage privacy such as protecting kiddos or allowing you to let your hair down among close friends and family while maintaining your professional decorum among business associates or even strangers who want to know you, even if you don't know them.

Others do it not so much for privacy concerns, but to avoid sending business-y messages and links to family and "old" friends who aren't into your business. That's thoughtful for sure, but there are other ways to manage this. 

Having multiple Facebook accounts is a bad idea for several reasons, one of which is that it violates Facebook's Terms of Use (see 4.2)

In the FAQs, they more thoroughly explain, 

If I already have a user profile, can I create a business account?

Maintaining multiple accounts, regardless of the purpose, is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use. If you already have a personal account, then we cannot allow you to create business accounts for any reason.

Facebook instead wants you to create a "Page" for your business presence rather than a separate personal profile. So, even if you have a company page (like mine) they would prefer that I set up a "Michelle Golden" business person page.

This is what Facebook "likes"!

They describe in the FAQ that you can manage all your Pages (and ads) that you create from your personal account. And if you don't want people clicking into your personal life, they won't. Facebook explains:

Please keep in mind that the fans of any of the Pages you administer will not have visibility or access to your personal account or profile. Any actions that you take as a Page administrator on your Page will show the Page’s name as the [poster] and not your personal name. To create a Page, simply click on the "Create a Page" link under the Sign Up section of www.facebook.com.

This is actually really cool because people can "like" and share your business page and posts so your content can go a lot further than just among your circle of approved "friends." Also, with a "Page" you can see (aggregated) statistics that tell you if you are engaging well with others, or are having your post stream hidden by others! (gasp)

But let's talk about the other reasons you might not want to divide your "friends" between two accounts in the first place.

1) MISSING OUT.

When you divide your feed, and "depersonalize" your interaction to the business peeps, you miss out on the whole purpose of using social media for business development! (more below)

2) MANAGING CONTENT RELEVANCE.

By creating "friend lists," you can designate content you DO want to go to certain people or DON'T want to go to certain people. In other words, if you don't want to burden "family" or "jr high friends" with your business posts, create a group for them and when you write the business post, simply set the post to exclude viewing by that group.

3) MANAGING PRIVACY.

Take advantage of Facebook's incredibly rich privacy settings. Avoid sharing your vacation photos (or any other content or links) with your business peeps by placing photos in a special album just for lists of "family" and "close friends."

REMEMBER, ENGAGING IS WHAT MAKES FACEBOOK VALUABLE AS A BUSINESS TOOL

Facebook is not for broadcasting! (No social media are for broadcasting.) It's for interacting.

Bottom line is that the much of the point and purpose of using social media in business is for people to become closer. As in friends. As in learning what they have in common and stuff.

I have some Facebook friends who only "do Facebook" for business and it shows. There is no personal engagement. No relationship building. No point (at least for me). It's dry. It's boring. It's a broadcast. No thanks.

REAL RESULTS

Yet there are other Facebook business people that I hardly knew or totally didn't know before friending on Facebook. Yet we got closer through Facebook. And these people actually constitute the largest percent of people that have hired me or referred business to me as a result of getting to know one another via ANY FORM of social media. More than LinkedIn and more than Twitter.

From personal experience (I haven't conducted a formal survey, but maybe I should) I attribute this to the fact that I am fairly personal (aka "myself") on Facebook. And they seem to be, as well. I share and they share. And we get to know each other. We mutually participate and banter. I congratulate them on their marathons, "like" their family photos and song posts, commiserate when they have a rough go, wish them well when they are ill. And I mean it. And they do the same. And it results in building our relationships.

HOW TO GET YOURSELF HIDDEN

People who only feed their Tweets, blog posts, and Foursquare without otherwise engaging others are completely missing out on the benefits of the relationship development aspect of Facebook. Typical user behavior is to "hide" the posts of these people.

There are also some people who, when others comment or congratulate, ignore the messages. Typical user behavior is to stop commenting on these people's posts. No one likes to be ignored. Sometimes hiding the posts of these people or even unfriending them is a next step.

Again, Facebook is not for broadcasting. It's not one way. Even brands that merely broadcast, and fail to engage, get "hidden" from user feeds.

WHAT NEXT?

So, instead of creating a separate business presence, first try the friend lists feature to control privacy and/or content distribution.

If that doesn't suit your needs, create a "Page" for yourself as a professional (even if your company has its own page...you can cross link the pages). But if you go the Page route, be sure that you still engage, and still show some of your personality there. If you want relationships to develop, that is!

Comments

[twitter.com/Marijean]

Michelle -- this is perfect and has been on my mind as well (I am pretty sure we have the same source of inspiration on this). I wholeheartedly agree with your stance on this and will share this post when I'm asked about this or when I see people going down this road. Thanks for a very useful post.

[Tracy Crevar Warren]

Great post Michelle. I am sure this is on the minds of many these days. Practical advice as usual!

[Michelle Golden]

Thanks Tracy and Marijean, it is a tough issue, for sure.

If we're over 30, we've pretty much been taught to keep our personal lives separate from business. Definitely the over 45s have so it is deeply ingrained!

Interestingly, in accounting and law, anyway, the over 60s remember what pre-Bates (Bates v Arizona State Bar) marketing was like...and that entailed deeper, more PERSONAL relationships than we've been doing since emulating corporations. I think that's why the 60+ crowd is less uncomfortable w/social media than the middle folks.

The bigger issue is TIME. Hope you two have some ideas for that challenge. :)