Have you ever thought about the relationship between your business presence and your personal presence on Facebook? Some people want to keep their personal Facebook life totally separate from their business one. Others prefer to blend them. Neither is right or wrong, so here’s some suggestions for both approaches.

 

Successfully Blend Your Personal and Business Lives on Facebook

  • Clearly associate your personal page with your business life.
    • Reference your business and/or your profession in the Intro section of your personal page.
    • Add your business page as a workplace in the Work and Education section of the About tab of your personal page.
    • List yourself as the manager of your business page, in the About section of the business page.
  • Selectively Post about business-related topics on your personal page – perhaps once or twice a week. Make sure these posts have Public as their post audience.
  • Share posts from your business page to your personal page, and vice versa. My preference is to primarily start my business posts on my business page and share them to my personal page. This approach reminds my Facebook friends that I have a business page.
  • Occasionally post about personal topics on your business page to help those who follow it to get to know more about you. For example, just after Mother’s Day, I shared a post with a photo of my daughters taken in the 1980s. It got a lot more engagement than many of my business-related posts.

 

Keep Your Personal and Business Lives Separate on Facebook

  • Go the settings for your personal page and select Friends for who can see your posts. Also, allow only Friends to be able to post on your page. Enable the setting where you get to review any post in which you are tagged on Facebook prior to it being published.
  • Avoid becoming personal Facebook friends with people you meet through the business world. Have them connect with you on your business page instead.
  • Consider carefully what you post on your business page in terms of political or other opinion-based subjects. Keep in mind that what you share could be seen by people who don’t share your sentiments but with whom you might wish to do business.
  • Don’t reference your business in the Intro section or the About tab on your personal page.
  • Don’t post about business topics on your personal page or personal topics on your business page.

 

How About You?

If you have a Facebook business page, do you blend your personal and business lives on Facebook? Or do you keep them separate? What approaches have you taken? Why have you made the decisions you have?

 

About Joyce

Joyce Feustel helps people, especially those age 45 and up, to become more effective using social media, especially Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

She works with business owners, business development professionals, business consultants, job seekers, and more – ranging from entrepreneurs to people in large corporations. Find her at www.boomerssocialmediatutor.com.