The more I network for my business as a social media tutor, the more people in the business world send me friend requests on Facebook. At first I ignored these requests, thinking that Facebook is a social media platform I use for personal reasons and LinkedIn is the platform I use for professional purposes.

Then over time, I began to accept at least some of the friend requests, as I found myself wanting to get to know my some of my business connections on a personal level too.

Some Advantages of Being Facebook Friends with Business Colleagues

• You can tag the business colleague on Facebook when you have used their services and want to do a public thank you. Let’s face it – a lot more people are likely to check their Facebook feed than their LinkedIn feed. So, more people will see the thank you.
• You can easily invite that business colleague to a business-related event you are attending. They might be more apt to notice the event through Facebook than through an email invitation.
• Being Facebook friends with people in a business referral group helps you to think of more ways to give them referrals for their business, and, one hopes of course that the reverse is true as well.

Some Disadvantages to Being Facebook Friends with Business Colleagues

• Some business colleagues might tag you excessively when they post on their own page. They might also invite you to events that don’t interest you and/or invite you to like various business pages. Of course, you can always remove these tags, not go the events, and ignore the invites to like pages. However, eventually you might choose to unfriend this person just to avoid this unwanted behavior.
• Some may post way too many times per day and/or post on topics that are of zero interest to you. You could just ignore their Facebook postings, or eventually you might choose to unfollow or unfriend them.
•  Maybe the colleague is someone you would prefer not be privy to information about your family and personal life, yet you feel as though you might be offending him or her by not accepting the friend request. One solution is to put this person into the status of Acquaintance (This is done by going to their personal timeline on Facebook and finding this option under the box that says Friends). Then make the privacy default for all your posts “Friends, but not Acquaintances.” This allows you to change the status to include Acquaintances for individual posts without worrying about oversharing.

 

It’s important to remember that both unfriending and unfollowing are done silently – meaning that the person being unconnected does not receive a message indicating that you have changed anything.

 

How About You?

Do you tend to accept friend requests from business colleagues? If so, what advantages and disadvantages have you experienced?

 

About Joyce

Joyce Feustel helps people, especially those age 50 and up, to become more effective using social media, especially Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter. She works with business owners, nonprofit organizations, retired people, consultants, and many others. Find her at www.boomerssocialmediatutor.com.