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People often ask me what the difference is between what they should post on their personal pages and what they should post on their business pages. This is particularly challenging on heavily integrated platforms like G+ or Facebook, where your personal and professional pages can be connected.
In my view, you have to be very careful what you post on either. Your name is associated with your professional endeavour so anything you are posting, personally or professionally, under your own name has to be appropriate and has to convey the image you want to convey.
You can try posting personal commentary that you are concerned doesn’t comport with your professional brand under a pseudonym, I suppose, but in my experience you are likely to be identified at some point by someone. So, honestly, I just wouldn’t. Keep it clean, informative, interesting, funny, engaging regardless of the name under which you are posting.
There is no reason you can’t post personal content, in fact you should because oftentimes the very point is to keep up with people in your personal life, and even on your professional pages people like to see who you are as person. Just don’t say anything you wouldn’t want to see in a newspaper headline attached to your name, regardless of whether it is on a page or platform that you have designated as personal or profession. To carry the alliteration one step further, your pages are also public and permanent, so be smart about whatever you say, wherever you say it.
With that caveat aside, I do make a distinction, though not a huge one, between what I post on my personal and business platforms.
I post both business and personal content on my personal pages, because my professional life is an integral part of me personally and I want my friends and family to see my professional content as well as my personal.
Generally, I post business related content on pages that I have determined to be for business only: LinkedIn and my G+ Business page.
However, in many instances what I am using a platform for is blurred. Twitter for example, is a tool I use for personal and professional objectives – to keep up with friends and colleagues, to get news and information and to post content that relates to my work. Some people I know have opened separate Twitter accounts to use for personal v. professional content, and if that works for you, go for it!
I already feel like I have too many things I have to keep up on so it is easier for me to just use judgment in what I post on Twitter and my G+ profile (another mixed use tool for me) than it would be for me to open numerous accounts on one or more platforms and try to keep them all straight. It may result in my saying less online than I might if I had strictly personal accounts, but given how I can rant when I get set-off by something, in my case less is definitely more.
The post What should I post on personal v. business social media pages? appeared first on Jane Southren.
