Social media has become entrenched in our personal and professional lives. We use social media to interact with many divergent social groups – friends, family, work, businesses, society at large. When we post, we form an impression and a record of our interactions. By the divergent nature of our social groups, not all posts are intend for general consumption. As such, it is important to develop a strategy for managing these social interactions. The goal is to engage each of the divergent groups that a person interacts with on social media, in order to maintain individual interest within the interaction, but to keep personal information from having a damaging effect on professional relationships. This article addresses potential strategies for segmenting personal, public, and professional faces on social media.
Leave a breadcrumb trail of information social media networks. Prospective employers and others in your industry will be searching for you on social media and totally locking down a social network so nothing appears can arose suspicion. In marketing field in particular, hiring managers will check out your social media profiles to see if you can bring activate expertise in managing social media to the table. A lack of content entirely does not inspire confidence in a hiring manager. Make sure that some posts on your personal use social media networks are public. These posts should be positive in nature and non-controversial. Over sharing can be far more dangerous and under sharing. When in doubt, be conservative with what you make public. I generally recommend setting all posts initially to private or friend view only and then once per month reviewing your post history and selecting what posts should be public
Advertise different social media platforms to personal and professional contacts. An example would be encouraging your personal contacts connect with you on Facebook while courting your professional contacts to connect with you on LinkedIn and Twitter. While Facebook for personal and LinkedIn for professional networking is a generalized rule of thumb in the US, this division is not universal as social networks have different market share and use internationally. You will also find that some professional contacts are more blended between their personal and professional lives than others and will break this rule of thumb. As such, expect to get invitations from professional contacts on your personal focused social networks.
Make a plan to deal with professional contacts applying to personal focused social media networks. For Facebook in particular, being typically the most personal of social networks, this challenge involves a thoughtful approach to your privacy settings. It’s important to think of the types of people who will be interacting with your posts on Facebook in order to appropriately segment your content – posts – in order to ensure that you are engaging all of your contacts while ensuring that you don’t push content to inappropriate groups. Your friends high school friends on Facebook probably don’t want to see your self-promotional business posts and your coworkers probably shouldn’t see pictures posted at 3am on Saturday. Here are the three main groups I recommend worrying about and how to adjust your privacy settings for each of these groups:
Public Contacts
It is important to engage potential friends and people who are searching for you. These contacts are not actually approved friends on Facebook. These contacts should have the most curated experience when reviewing your profile. I recommend setting all pictures to only friends can view in your privacy settings, making sure to turn a few safe pictures to public. No posts should be public by default, but you should review posts and turn them public at a future date in order to ensure content. Keep in mind that, unfortunately, criminals do use social media – so for safety sake, it is important to never publicize vacations, absences from your home, or current location information on your public profile. Public posts should be kept to safe, non-controversial subject matters.
Industry Contacts
Assign all industry and work contacts to a group in Facebook. By assigning these contacts to a group, you can setup specific privacy settings from the group at large. Disable this group’s ability to see what you have liked on Facebook. This prevents them from accessing a like to a private page that may be controversial or offend a superior’s sensibilities. Set your default picture and tag settings to not display to this group. This prevents 3am photos from becoming office discussion topics. By having these contacts in group, you can make posts on your work, publications, or professional materials private to this group so that you don’t seem self-promotional to your friends.
Close Friends
Assign all close friends to a group in Facebook. Allow this group access to your wall, but require your permission to make wall posts visible to anyone other than your close friends. You can allow this group to tag you in photos, so long as only people in this group can see your tagged photos. This allows your friends the freedom to interact with you as they choose, without necessarily publicizing these interactions for the world and your professional contacts to see. By assigning friends to one group, you can easily make posts that are more personal and curated to people who interact closely with you.