I just read a great article about the pros and cons of friending a boss or colleague on Facebook in last week’s Globe and Mail. It can be hard to decide if sharing your more personal side with co-workers and supervisors is a good thing or a bad thing. The article recommends some strategies for accepting and declining invitations without sabotaging your professional relationships. Here are some other points to consider when deciding how to use Facebook or other online networking tools.
- Every online networking site has the potential for good and bad. Even if your boss or colleagues aren’t connections, you still need to manage your online identity responsibly. Each time you post something online, think about how you would feel if others outside your social circle could view it. Sometimes a phone call or a face to face conversation just makes more sense.
- Whether you like it or not, Facebook is now a mainstream social networking site. Recruiters use it, hiring managers use it, and companies build corporate groups on it. One day someone who is in a position to share a job lead with you may find you on it. Use it to build meaningful relationships based on trust and reciprocity, not to share every random thought that you have. It’s fine to share experiences, photos, personal victories, insights, and recommendations…this is what makes Facebook so valuable…but it’s best to share them in a mature and tasteful way that adds value to someone’s life.
- You don’t have to share everything with everyone. Facebook allows you to create closed groups. This feature can be used quite effectively to create exclusive circles based on certain interests without offending other connections.
- Facebook is not the only game in town. If there are certain aspects of your personal life that you prefer to keep private, perhaps Facebook isn’t the right forum for every side of you. For example, you can create a closed group on Ning rather than sharing everything on Facebook.
- It’s important to become an educated consumer when it comes to any business or social networking site. Two great reads on online networking are I’m on Facebook….Now What??? and I’m on LinkedIn…Now What???