We are using social media more these days and I am sure many of us, especially small business owners or freelancers, tend to share or publish both personal and business-related content onto our social media streams.
Sure, we can dump everything into one place but this also means that our stream cause people who are not interested in just a part of what we share to get overwhelmed and turned off. For example, close friends may be interested in the food photos that you are taking but the followers who are following you because of your insights on a specific subject matter will be annoyed.
I’ve been “optimizing” how I share things on my social media profile and I’m wondering how the rest of the SP community is doing it.
Just share your way of sharing things (settings, lists, using specific platforms for specific purposes, etc.) and let’s improve our social media experience together.
I’ve been trying something sort of different and it seems to be working. I have several blogs, all of which I am transferring to one multi-blog platform, so none of them are online right now. The transfer is two steps forward and one step back, so it’s taking a while to complete. In the meantime, I have been building a following on FB and Twitter. I am learning what type of audience I can attract with my tweets and FB posts and hope to attract them to my blog posts as well when the day rolls around that my blogs are online again.
When my blog ‘network’ (as I call it) is complete, I am also planning a FB fan page and will keep my personal page away from business promotion unless I post something on a blog that I believe will interest my current friends. I’ll use the fan page to promote my business page and my blogs as well as other tech-related and similar mediums. That part, I will just need to wait and see how it works.
I also have a regional FB fan page for area dog owners. Not much news from us, so I keep it updated with posts from other sources of interest to dog care takers and when I do share a photo from another source, I try to keep it on topic for my fan group. Although the group is small and will remain small because of its nature and regional demographic, it is still growing little by little.
[font=verdana]Personally, I try to keep everything separate, although I may be something of an oddity here…
I register a different email address for each website I visit, so there’s no way that Google can easily track my activity on Facebook, Twitter or anything else. I don’t connect to other websites using Facebook, eg blogs and news sites where I might want to leave comments, I will at best use Disqus but preferably a unique log-in for that site only. For the simple reason that I want it to be my decision exactly what I share and with whom. I don’t necessarily want everyone I connect with at work, or here on SPF, to know all my other hobbies and interests, to see all my photos of family and friends, etc.
Maybe that’s a bit of control freakery, but it works for me. It helps that, for example, my only activity on Facebook is personal, and there’s no overlap with any work elements – conversely, my only activity on Twitter is (semi-)work related and I don’t tweet or follow anyone on a personal tack. But even if there was overlap (eg if I started to use Twitter for myself) I would still try to keep things separate.[/font]
This is an interesting approach, Stevie. Do you find it cumbersome as there are many consolidation of services happening out there?
Just to name a few, Google+ and Youtube integration, more blogs are implementing Facebook comments, Facebook becoming a text and voice messaging platform, Author Rank (Google+) to be taken into account as a signal for SEO of written content, etc.
It’s great to take a step back and look at how I approach social media and reading about how others are doing it. I’ll be sharing mine soon.
[font=verdana]I find it really irritating when there are sites that require me to log in through Facebook (which I don’t want to do) or some other service that I don’t have, without giving me the option to register just for that site. If I have to use my Facebook log-in to comment on an article then I don’t comment, and I probably don’t go back to that site again. My life has many different strands, and while I am not generally too suspicious about Google and Facebook’s motives, I don’t want to surrender all control of them, I want to decide what things I publicly associate and what I don’t.
Disqus is a half-way house – I only use it for commenting on blogs and news sites, so it tends to link similar themes and activities, and it doesn’t provide any other connection to the wider ‘me’. Apart from that, I don’t find it a problem using different log-ins, my computer remembers them all, and it means that if one account is broached the others are still safe – equally, it has enabled me to warn a couple of sites that they had inadvertant security leaks when I started getting spam addressed to an email account that had only ever been used for commenting on that one site.[/font]
Can you share with us what application you use to remember all the logins on your computer or are you referring to the saved passwords available on browsers? I have all my passwords & logins in a notebook application on my computer, but it still is cumbersome to look them up each time I visit a site not saved in my browser. I also often worry about browser security and there are several sites that I don’t allow my browser to save logins.
Wayne,
From personal experience I have found that keeping things separate is more attractive to the viewer because they are not being bombarded with additional information that is unrelated to what they are looking for. Some people who are not familiar with your site could interpret this as unwanted advertising or spam.
I have my own domain name, so the email address is always the website name at my domain (eg sitepoint@example.com). I tend to use the same password wherever I can, so that isn’t hard to remember either (and because the log-in name is different each time, I don’t believe it is such a major security risk). And yes, I rely on my browser remembering most of them.
[font=verdana]I think there is, I’ve just never bothered to try it out – my system works for me, although I realise I tend to do things differently from most people!
The program that I think is one of the most popular is 1password, which costs US$50.[/font]
Yup, I am of the same opinion with you and thus, for personal profiles, I like social networks like Facebook and Google+ more as compared to Twitter because the latter doesn’t allow sharing with a specific group of individuals.
You can try Lastpass, which has a web interface where you can refer to all your saved passwords and it also synchronizes across browsers as long as you have the extension installed. It’s completely free, unless you want your passwords to be available on your iOS or Android devices.
I am now using Lastpass’ password generator but before this, instead of using the same password across multiple sites or some random strings that are hard to remember, I try to come up with different passwords using a preset syntax that I am familiar with.
For example:
Facebook: waynelfb[followed by a unique number that I know (last 4 digits of something)]
Twitter: wayneltwt[followed by a unique number that I know (last 4 digits of something)]
This way, the passwords will stay different but they will be much easier for me to remember.
Don’t attempt to hack my accounts, the passwords above won’t work.
We can use the Professional Business as the Company Branding plus the personal as the account name. Like I’m Mr. Blah owner of Blahoo.com.
Mr. Blah is for personal branding while Blahoo is the business branding. Therefore hitting two birds with one stone in promoting online. As what Stevie D.
Personally, I try to keep everything separate, although I may be something of an oddity here…
We can separate both on Social Media. Your choice.
That is certainly one solution, although I do use an encrypted note taking application already. However, if you read the thread, you will see that my question to Stevie D was if he used an AUTOMATED desktop application such as Master Password for Google Chrome (which is for Browsers). You can not, to my knowledge automate Excel. In addition, I don’t use MS products. My OS is Linux.
you’ve got your point! I have this friend in fb who uses his personal account to post his products and all. My timeline would cover up most of his products and it’s just terribly annoying! It should be great to separate both personal and business facebook pages. If you have your business page, add your friends, for sure some will add you up. At least they can anticipate that the page is all about business and they can expect that you’d be posting stuffs about your products. You can filter people who may like what you are sharing online. And then you can promote your page to other facebook pages and groups, other social networks, and whatever it is you can think of.
hmm… sounds like an interesting thought… i would rather prefer making groups and lists of people from various sectors or relations… like firneds different group, workers different, family different and business work different. and according share the relevant posts with the lists or groups. this is much simpler. and its not too much pain.
and if you think you post too much of work related stuff in ur personal page, then you should opt out and make 2 different page or profiles for yourself. one completely profession oriented and one personal.
I would rather have a separate one because I have different purposes for each one of them. But if I were to pick one of them I would rather sacrifice my personal issues for the benefit of the company, because there are other ways to make up for it while on the business end there are few alternatives.
Sharing on Social Media site has a huge impact on a large groups of audience it help you to share your ideas, views, posts related to either your personal happening or professional achievement over a wide range of coverage.
Through social media you can cover a large group of audience, so it is quite relevant to make the decision whether to use personal profile or business profile for sharing your information across the board. Point here to be consider is to analyze how much impact you have on social media from personal & professional prospective.
The choice of choosing a social media over the other is quit predictable in terms of your need, area of your interests, & users involvement.
Choosing personal profile or business profile on social media for creating your influence you need to check which goes well with your locality users interest in locality are they interested in getting the information through Business pages or personal profile.
