I started Facebook for my family.

I hear this almost every day “I started using Facebook to keep up with my family, but now I have business connections on there.  I am not sure I should have them both.”  That is a very important statement, and a very important thought process to complete before you decide.

Ask yourself the following:

1. Do I want to grow my business connections and am I okay with being personal with business people?
2. Do I have a filter (eg am I going to want to share when my son is potty trained or when the dog just took a dump in the house?)
3. Do I understand all of the Facebook security and privacy settings available to me?
4. Do I need a Fan Page for business connections and a Facebook profile for my family and friends?

If you have a filter and understand the business of people doing business with people, then you are more than ready to combine work and family on your profile.  If on the other hand you would prefer to keep these two worlds separate and you are not ready for a fan page, then just connect with business people on LinkedIn.

If you have decided to combine both worlds on your profile, review your privacy settings:

1. Check your photo album settings.  You can make them visible to specific groups or individuals.  You should not make all pictures open for everyone to view.  Even if you are a photographer.
2. If you would not say something on the side of a bus, then send it in a message.  A DM (direct message) is a much better way to communicate with someone one on one versus talking really loud to one person in a crowd and posting a simple personal message to their wall.
3. Use the “@” symbol to highlight businesses, fan pages and people you want to cross promote.  This is a wonderful way to say “a great job” or “I recommend this person.”
4. You can tie your website, blogs and twitter feeds directly to your Facebook profile using apps and tabs.  Check them out.
5. Consider your audience when picking your profile picture – this is the first thing someone sees when they search you on Facebook.
6. Set your privacy settings to share your “information” with all, but keep the rest of your page (and connections) private until your are “friends”.  This is like handing out your business card before handing someone your full life biography.
7. Keep it light on your status.  We all have super icky days and work clients we would love to just trash – but screaming about it (in all caps) on your status is more likely to turn friends and contacts off than to keep growing your network.
8. Use groups.  Under the “edit friends” setting you can create groups.  Please take the time to set these up and you can check status updates by group, send messages by group, share albums by groups – allowing you laser focus in your communications versus buckshot.
9. Do not invite every person to every event.  If your event is local you can invite your local groups, do not flood others with events they will not attend.  It takes away from the purpose of a targeted event and communication.
10. Consider sharing open events on your wall, but targeting your invitations.  A message accompanied by an invitation will bring you more response than an open event with no idea why a person should consider attending.

Sure, Facebook was started as a way for college students to communicate and share “experiences” but consider these statistics published by Facebook:

• There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
• Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
• Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
• More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.

• There are more than 150 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
• There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

Opportunities for both personal connections, increased family communications and business abound!

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