You may have heard people say Facebook shouldn’t be used for business or professional networking because it’s a personal social networking site. They say personal and professional spheres shouldn’t be mixed.
But if you haven’t started using Facebook yet, that’s a non-issue for you. You don’t have any personal relationships in Facebook, so you have a blank slate. There is nothing to mix with your professional or business relationships. You could use Facebook for purely professional reasons, and keep the personal out of it.
I got to thinking about this when I looked at some of the friends highlighted on my Facebook profile. Most of them joined at my invitation. I have blurred the names to safeguard their identity.
They haven’t put pictures on their profiles, which is why they are represented by big question marks. They haven’t sought out high school or college classmates. They haven’t added personal information about favorite movies, books or activities. They have blank slates.
What you put into your profile, the applications you add and the friends you seek and accept are up to you. There are lots of great potential uses for Facebook in business networking, and I’ve written previously about ways to separate the personal and professional here and here.
But if you’ve gotten this far without having a Facebook profile for your personal life, and if keeping personal and professional separate is important to you, you may well decide to leave the truly personal information out of Facebook. You can have Facebook for business use only.
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