This blog entry is about your social media presence and how I believe you should deal with each part of your personal social media presence. I am not exactly an expert at Social Media, but I would say that I pretty understand 95% of it. So, in essence I know a little bit.
What Is Your Social Media Presence?
Your social media presence is simply the media outlets that you push your content through, like your Facebook page, your Twitter handle, your Linkedin Link, Your Instagram name, your Blog with tags and categories, and any other place where you publicize yourself and your content online. I would go further and describe any social media site you have a presence on. For instance I am running events on both Meetup and Eventbrite, so I would give them some thought to being part of your social media presence. I am now big on Periscope and Meerkat, the new streaming social media peer to peer apps, that are part of your new social media. There are also a bunch of new sites like Behance and Thumbtack. They are for finding work, but they have your profile there, so they are contenders for social media. There are others like Snapchat, Ello, Path and so on, and so on.
What Do I Mean By Separated?
Now that I have identified the media outlets that can be referred to as social media, you should make a decision about who you are online. Who do you want to be? And to whom do you want to be that person? I personally think that Facebook has nothing to do with business or personal networking. That’s just an opinion. Therefore, if you meet me at a business networking event and then ask to Friend me on Facebook, I am basically going to ignore the request. If you ask me to link to you on Linkedin, that makes sense to me. If you are my cousin from Holland (shout out to Nico) and you want to share some photos of the family then friend me on Facebook, not on Linkedin. Twitter is similar. I think its all business, but you have to decided what it is for you. If you think that all social media is open to you for your personal life, I think that this a big mistake.
What Is Your Personal Persona?
I believe Facebook is more of a personal network thing. I think that you don’t want people eventually to be able to find a photo of you drunk in college on your Facebook page. That will have a long term impact on your being hired for work. I think that people need to understand what each of these social media outlets are good for and how they are going to use them. I am also seeing Instagram and Snapchat as being purely personal relationship based and not for business relationships. You need to make sure you control your personal social media and decide once again who you are online.
What Is Your Business Persona?
I personally think that Linkedin is purely a business relationship social media. It has been used for some personal use, but once again leave that to Facebook or Instagram. I am not even a big user of Facebook , but I am advocating to use it solely for personal use. Twitter I use for business purposes. I have seen it used for personal uses, and that is ok, maybe. It depends. If you ever wanted to change who you are, what you believe and keep a business profile, you need to make an early decision about what you tweet about. If you want to keep a personal Twitter account separate from a business account, then set up a second twitter account. I have about 5 I use.
What Is Your Political Persona?
Finally there is the point of view social media from a political point of view. This is one that I always felt would trip me up, so I have never tweeted my political opinion or written a blog entry on my business blog about politics. Nor have I entered a political opinion on Linkedin. I think that you could do this, but you have deal with the repercussions. For instance, half the people you work with will never agree with your point of view. If they can read your tweets about who you hate running for president, then you are really giving away your political point of view. I don’t even think using Facebook for this is a good thing. Trust me, half of your family has another point of view. Why piss them off as well? So, how to deal with this is to create another personality on twitter and in my case political blogging. I have a pseudo name I have been politically blogging under for 12 years. I don’t do it often, but when I have an opinion I use my alias, not my name. I don’t like it interfering the other parts of my social media world. It is not necessary.
Lessons Learned
Don’t mix your personal, business and political personas! Keep them separate and up to standards that make sense. Mixing these social medias at will between personal and business are quite dangerous. Next time you don’t get that job offer, it could be because of your highly voiced opinion. There is tons of space for opinions on-line. In order to have good relations with everybody in your life, you need to make sure you keep these worlds segmented and separated so you are not seen as the enemy. In fact, if you do a great job of this, your friends or associates with differing opinions will come to respect you. Keep it out of the office. At DSX Labs, our tech incubator over the past year we have a saying, when the republicans come in the door we are republicans and when the democrats come in the door we are democrats!