Keeping Your Social Media Strategy Professional

For those of us that have Twitter and Facebook accounts it can be a difficult task to determine how to keep things professional if your main focus is to build a strong business network. Even if you start with the intention of keeping things professional, all it takes is one tweet or one photo to transform a professional site into something that some may find a bit unprofessional. We love social media sites because things are so instantaneous, but we forget that a single tweet can generate a rush of replies in mere seconds. So, policing your own accounts can become a full-time job. It is very important to make the purpose of your account clear from the first moment it is activated.

One of the things that can cause an issue on Facebook is the fact that people can tag you in on pictures they post without your approval. Therefore, your profile can be open to risk of unprofessional exposure. It is very important to monitor your Facebook on a daily basis for photos that may not align you as a business professional. All it can take to turn a potential business contact away is an unprofessional photo that you may not even be aware of.

Facebook has a number of privacy settings that can help you keep things separated. For example you can create a number of different friend lists so that you can have one group for friends, one for family and one for business contacts. This allows you to set up privacy settings for each group. For example, you may want to share photos of your family vacation with your friends and family contacts, but not your professional contacts. There are also settings on Facebook that allow you to remove yourself from public search results. This will help keep your personal information separate from your professional information. It also may be helpful to remove yourself from Google. This can also be done by going to your personal settings page.

There are also settings on Twitter that can help keep your postings private so that only people that you approve of can see them. It is important to understand that once you change this setting it will make any new postings private, but postings made before you changed the setting will still be public.

Doing a little research and taking the time to learn how to safeguard your personal information is a good idea on many levels. It will also help you to separate the information that you want to share with your family and friends from that which you want to share with your professional contacts. These things will help you to keep a professional rapport with your professional contacts while still sharing photos of your vacations with your family and friends. This will help you keep things professional with your professional contacts and they will not be distracted by personal information. Social media sites can be a great benefit to your business if you just take a few precautions.