Should you separate personal and professional social media?

Posted by Colin Clark on Oct 19th, 2009 | View Comments home title

Ever since I started doing social media consulting, I’ve been getting the same question.

Should I create different facebook and twitter profiles for personal and business?

The reason why I keep getting this question is that there really isn’t a good answer. However, there are clear advantages to each alternative, so here is a list of some of the pros and cons of each approach.

Separating Business and Personal

Advantages

Privacy – If you’re not comfortable sharing your personal life, a separate business account might be a good idea.
You won’t offend anyone – If you’re worried that your lifestyle might offend someone or look unprofessional, you might need separate accounts.
You won’t annoy your non-business friends with your business stuff.

Disadvantages

Complexity – it is more work to manage two accounts.
Confusion – if people are searching for you, they could potentially find either account.
Conflicting message – a lot of what we do ends up on the internet anyway. Stuff that’s on your personal profiles could become public and make you look worse than if you had just had an open profile to begin with.

Having a single account that serves both business and personal.

Advantages

Easy – only one account to manage.
Increases your marketing potential by employing family and friends – How many of your friends and family members really know what you do? If you ‘market’ to them as well as your business contacts, they can refer people to you. That’s business that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
More authentic – You’re not going to look like you’re hiding anything if you disclose your party picks on facebook in advance.

Disadvantages

You might offend someone and lose opportunities. As more and more people start ‘getting’ the social media thing, this becomes less of a problem, but I think it’s only fair to acknowledge that someone could be offended by your tailgate pics from the previous weekend.
You give up a degree of privacy. If you’re an intensely personal individual, there are probably lots of things about social media that just don’t sit well with you.

The Top 45 Objections To Using Social Media (directmarketingobservations.com)
European regulators eye privacy at Facebook, Twitter (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
Social Media Coaching Groups Starting this Fall (marketing-helper.com)

Susan

You forgot some major disadvantages of have business mixed with personal. Even if you setup all the privacy for profile viewing and friends, ALL of the emails and alerts that have to do with the business group or fan pages will go to your PERSONAL email account. I find this inappropriate. I want to use a work email for work and a personal email for personal. The two should not mix. I don't want RSVPs for a work event and responses for a work posting to go to my personal email account.

I feel bad for the major corporations who have a single employee have to ruin his/her personal account by running the Fan Page for Snickers or Tide. And not only that, if they created that Fan Page, their account can never be removed from that Page as they are the creator. Too bad if those corporations fire that person. The creator cannot be deleted and has the power to alter the page even if they are not an admin.

FB needs to allow us keep business separate from personal.
Colin Clark

I use separate email accounts for my social media accounts. There's no way I can keep up with social media messages and email at the same time. Usually if something interesting happens on facebook or twitter, I'll find out about it there, not in my email.

As far as individuals within a comany... it's definitely a concern. For fan pages, I recommend creating a 'dummy' account if it's a huge organization. That way several people can contribute and it doesn't ruin someone's personal account.

However, employees can still use their personal accounts to promote marketing initiatives, interact with people on fan pages, and just be real with people online.
Susan

"For fan pages, I recommend creating a 'dummy' account if it's a huge organization."

Totally agree. Totally against FB policy, which is why I am annoyed.
Colin Clark

I don't mind violating Facebook's policies. Social media is all about 'sticking it to the man' as far as I'm concerned.
susan

Except when they close all of your accounts, which happens. I am the point in my life where I choose which battles to fight and how to fight them. I would rather not have the account that I use all of the time closed and continuously write FB, and support others to write FB, to change rules that make no sense.