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By: MJ Gonzales | Executive Chronicles
Except LinkedIn that is specifically for professional networking, social media sites have wider scopes in terms of audience and features. It’s liberating to use those sites to interact with your friends, relatives, and acquaintances. But what if your colleagues, associates, boss, and clients also follow you on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram?
Whether you bothered with the consequences or not of mixing your contacts, it’s good if you are aware of the complications of mixing personal and professional network on social media. Three of the many issues to consider are privacy, your online persona, and work performance.
Privacy. You are maybe talkative in general, but you can’t talk everything with one person or one group. Besides, it’s non-sense for somebody to know something he or she doesn’t want to know about you. It’s same with thinking about your officemates and bosses that are part of your personal Facebook account. Keep in mind that nowadays the privacy setting on social media sites are not as secured as before.
What if you randomly mention something about resignation? Sometimes even if you don’t put name or hashtags, someone from your officemates will think otherwise. Guess what, it’s easy to share that you’re only playing online to your boss.
Performance. For so many times, being so active on social media sites is named as one of the factors that affect work performance. However, what’s not usually mention is the kind of updates you see on your wall and what if your job entails using social media sites. Unless you have techy prowess to customize what you only want to see, creating social media account(s) for professional use is probably better. During office hours, just log on the account that you create for your work. Interact with your customers and officemates, and then receive only updates you have to check. In this way, you don’t need to drop calls or turn invisible when a virtual friend contacting you out of the blue while you’re working.
Online persona. Depending on your other goals, being too conscious about updating online will also affect you. What if you have sidelines that you need to market online like house and lot or you also like to do videoblogging? Though having many followers will help you to promote your stuff, it’s not what it is if you mix personal and professional contacts. Do you feel odd when your officemate see your Dubsmash videos?
Meanwhile, keeping social media account for both personal and professional use have advantages too. This aside from the fact that it’s hard and confusing to switch accounts when you post photos and messages.
