Keep Your Personal and Professional Life Separate on Facebook

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This post is a continuation of what I wrote in June.

At first glance, one would not think of Facebook as a professional networking site. When I finally signed up over a year ago, I was shocked at the number of business contacts that I had that were already on Facebook. I quickly learned that I had to learn how to keep professional and personal sides of my Facebook account separate.

Here are a few tips that have helped me keep my two worlds apart:

  1. Create Friend Lists: Separate your friends based on how you met them, etc. For example in my profile I have quite a few lists going. Networking for people I met through business networking events, clients for clients, high school, college. Etc. Just click on the “Friends” tab to edit and create lists.

  2. Facebook Friends Lists
  3. When in doubt, let people see the Limited Profile: When people request you as a friend, but you don’t remember how or where you met, make their default view the limited profile. You can control what can be seen in the limited profile. If it’s a business contact, they will not see last year’s Halloween picture of you being “less than stellar”. Go to “Settings > Privacy Settings >Profile Privacy” to edit and choose who sees what based on your friend lists.

  4. Facebook Privacy Settings
  5. Control What Applications are visible in your profile
    Go to ” Settings > Application >Settings

  6. To avoid the right people seeing the wrong applications, you can select which people get to see what applications on your profile. For instance, I don’t want my clients or my networking contacts to see who poked me so I blocked them from see this particular application.

  7. Control who finds you: You can control who finds you in Facebook via the search privacy settings. You can select whether or not you want people to see your picture or if they can add you as a friend. Go to “Settings > Privacy > Search” to access.

  8. Click Here for a screenshot

    UPDATE: For a primer on social media, check out my guest post on the Admissions Blog at Metropolitan College of New York.

    With these tips, you will be in the driver’s seat of your social networking destiny.

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Posted by Stephanie Cockerl in Facebook, social networking | Read before you comment |

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