Facebook Faux-Pas: Keeping your content appropriate on social networks

It's no secret that the earliest adopters of Facebook – college students back in 2004 – are now establishing themselves as industry professionals (scary thought: some of them are pushing thirty). Less obvious is how these tech-savvy young professionals now have a lot in common with their more seasoned coworkers and colleagues who adopted Facebook much later. Both groups are now facing a dilemma: will I use Facebook to interact with friends, or will it be strictly professional?

A while back, we were discussing this very issue here at InView, and it seemed that everyone had their own workaround. As we discussed our personal resolutions, and those of people we knew, a few general approaches emerged:

• "I don’t add anyone I work with"
• "I have one ‘personal’ profile and one ‘professional’ profile"
• "I add anyone I know, but I never post anything"
• "I add anyone I know, but I use Facebook’s privacy settings to determine who sees what"
• "I add anyone I know and I post whatever I want"

There are pros and cons for any of these approaches; for example, denying anyone you work with avoids the problem of them seeing your comments about how much you dislike the company you work for, but there may be real-world implications for denying someone who wants to be friends online. They may get the impression that you don’t like them.

Having two profiles can help someone mentally segregate their personal and professional self, but they better make darn sure they’re logged into the correct one before they post those iffy Vegas pictures. It could also be confusing to friends, relatives and colleagues who discover both profiles. They may wonder why you need more than one.

Also, if you are going to add anyone you know, then there is some expectation that you will participate. If you never comment, post updates, or otherwise engage your connections, they may un-friend you, believing you don’t use the account any more. On the other hand, if you post whatever you want, you run the risk of offending people you work with. This could have some very uncomfortable, real-world consequences for you.

My favorite option is using the privacy settings. I place my connections into groups, such as “family,” “friends,” “coworkers,” “clients,” etc, and then carry on appropriately. If I want to post a link to a hilarious YouTube clip of a cat playing a keyboard, I will use the privacy settings next to the “Share” button to designate the clip as visible to friends and family, but to no one else. Then I don’t run the risk of looking unprofessional to clients and colleagues. The only real downside to this approach is that it takes some time and thought to categorize your connections, and you have to make sure you are posting content appropriate to the group that will be allowed to see it.

So what do you do? Take our poll, and let us know in the comments if there’s some other method that we didn’t even think of!