How do you keep personal social media separate from business?
This will depend on your mission for participating in social media. If you are an entrepreneur, your social media sites should reflect you as one person, with different interests. Your personal and your business life are probably overlapping anyway, so your social media presence will too. Share some glimpses of your personality in your posts, and create an online persona. This does not mean that you should release all of your personal details, or air anything that is too personal online. Why would you want to share too much online anyway? Even when people think something is private, whether a direct message to someone, via email, or only visible to friends online, anything you put into this electronic media is available online, forever. Before you hit publish or send consider that you are taking out a billboard on the interstate. Does your message pass the test?
If a company is developing a social media strategy, they may be tempted to create a presence for the company. Consider how you feel when you read a message from XYZ Company, versus one from Jane, the marketing director. Any message that comes from a person is way more personal, and we’ll be more inclined to listen. Visit Facebook or Twitter. Look around. How do you feel when reading posts from a company? Let your response be the judge, and then ask your customers what they want. At the very least, a company needs representatives blogging and posting. Share a bio of each of the contributing individuals. Create a company persona and then let us meet the individuals in that company. It’s a must.
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