The following is an excerpt from my new book, Facebook Marketing.  If you haven’t picked up your copy yet, you can check out this excerpt, read a few reviews and then decide if you think it will be helpful to you.

With Facebook starting out as a personal network, it has been a hard transition for people to become used to it as also a professional network.  Most use LinkedIn as a professional network, Facebook as a personal network, and Twitter is a hybrid that people are still trying to figure out.  But with the growth rate of Facebook, many have started to turn to it as a personal branding tool and professional network.  Marketers have begun turning to Facebook with Facebook Pages, Groups, and advertising as a way to reach out to their prospects, customers, and fans.

This transition has created a dilemma for many folks because they are resistant to using Facebook as a professional network, yet their colleagues, competition, and companies are become active on the network.  Also, as we develop friends in our industries, we want to extend that friendship and therefore turn to Facebook.  This starts to blur that line even further between work and home.  However, as Dawn Foster of WebWorkerDaily points out, we don’t want to confuse “personal” for “private”:

You can actually be professional and personal at the same time in social media without too much effort.  When we talk about ‘being personal’ on social media websites, I think that many people confuse ‘personal’ with ‘private.’  The reality is that you get to decide what to share and what not share, so you can still keep most areas of your private life private.

To deal with this dilemma, individuals typically have three options to choose from:

1. Maintain a single Facebook profile that combines personal and professional.
2. Maintain two different Facebook profiles: one personal and one professional.
3. Keeping Facebook only personal and not mixing work into it.

Each of these has both upsides and downsides with not one clear answer or best practice, as of yet.  Thought it might not be clear yet, this will be important for you as a marketer.  Let’s explore each of these options.

Single Facebook Profile

If you don’t mind mixing personal and professional, you can maintain a single Facebook profile in which all engagement with the platform originates from that one profile.  This enables people to get to know the real you.  It’s just like the two faces that most wear on a daily basis: the way you are at your office and the way you are at home, with friends, or family.

Although so many of us are used to this split personality, why should we act like this?  Why can’t we be the same person at work as we are at home, maybe just dressed up a little nicer?  You have the same likes and dislikes, the same problems and victories, and your family, friends, enemies, colleagues and competitors don’t change when you’re at work versus when you’re at home.

Furthermore, realizing its growth, Facebook has continued to add features that allow you to tweak your privacy settings to allow you to use a single profile but limit access to data sets based on permissions, lists, and rules that you set up.  This means that you can create a list of your colleagues and then deny that list access to certain aspects of your profile.  By setting this up properly, you can achieve the privacy and separation that you want while not having to bother with two separate profiles or avoiding Facebook as a professional network.

Two Different Facebook Profiles

If you want to maintain split personas, between your personal and professional lives, you can create two different Facebook profiles.  One Facebook profile you can create as your personal account in which you upload personal photos, videos, and bio info.  This is the account where you interact with your friends, family, and others that you allow into your personal circle.  Just remember to use a personal email account and not one that anyone in your professional life knows.  If you use the same email, you open your personal profile to being found by colleagues.  Of course, you can always ignore the friend request, but it much easier and simpler to just use a separate email account.

The second account should be set up under a work email address that your colleagues would use to search for you.  Under this profile you can upload any professional content that you would like to share.  To reduce confusion between these two profiles, you should consider hiding one of the profiles from Facebook searches and indexing by search engines.  This can be done through the privacy settings for your profile(s).  Which one to hide is up to you, or you can hide both, if you want.

Not Mixing Personal and Work

Your last option is to simply not mix personal and work.  Some people decide that the easiest route is just not to promote their presence on Facebook.  They maintain Facebook as their personal social network and use LinkedIn as their professional network to connect with colleagues.  For those wanting to maintain that separation between personal and work, you might find this to be your cleanest option.

What’s your take? Do you maintain separate profiles or use a single profile for all engagement?

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Photo Credit: laikolosse