About using Social Networking Platforms Professionally

I have been following an interesting discussion on Draftfcb‘s blog lately. Josh raised a question on the professional usage of social networking platforms and how requests to persons in the social media space should be handled. Following is an excerpt with my comment on his posting. You can follow the original discussion on the blog of Draftfcb.

I think there is only a small line between professional and personal networking.

I’ve been using Facebook pretty much only for personal contacts and LinkedIn for professional relationships. But over the last couple of months I’ve been getting more and more requests from my professional contacts on Facebook.

I agree, Joshua – usage is a matter of personal preferences and I’ve decided I’ll restrict the professional contacts on Facebook to the people I know in person (i.e. having actually met the person or having had at least a conversation on the phone), instead of building limited groups.

Twitter is a different story though – I’ve been using Twitter for personal updates in the beginning, but have switched completely to “professional” updates, as most of my followers are professionals. I’m using TweetDeck to follow or retweet on Twitter, and trigga.me to update my status on a couple of sites at once.

Coming back to your initial question, I would say we can use the tools that exist already more professionally. Good thing about it? You can test them at very low cost, you can figure out how they work and which impact they have. As long as you have some sort of controlling in place to measure impact…

I think we still learn each day a little bit more in the social media era and I truly believe we will have more customers asking us for “Social Marketing Strategies”, which makes it part of our professional future.

You can follow the original discussion on the blog of Draftfcb.