Facebook No-Nos (Part one of a 4 part Facebook Etiquette series)
These days it’s almost impossible to keep your personal and professional lives separate with the rampant use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, blogs and many others. The trouble is, what information should you post, and is there a line between personal and too personal? It’s hard to avoid hearing about co-workers, family members and friends that have been caught off-guard by exposing too much of their dirty laundry and have suffered essentially from social and career suicide. I did a little research on Failbook.com and my own personal peeves concerning Facebook and I came up with the following list of tips to keep your image spic and span and still have fun. Here’s the first part in the four part series.
TMI (Too Much Information): Putting too much personal information on your Facebook account can make it look cluttered and leave you vulnerable to things like identity theft. Appropriate information is that which you’d be ok with your boss, old high school teacher or your mom seeing.
less is MORE: Applications like Farmville can be fun and addicting but make sure that if you have them that they are hidden and aren’t posting to your wall or inviting your friends to be your neighbor. The fewer applications linked to and visible on your profile, the faster your page loads and the cleaner and more professional it looks.
Plague Status Updates: These updates are ones no one want to see or hear about. A mis-type, accidental posting or the revealing of news more suited for personal interaction make people cringe… You also never know when someone will pick up the post and share it on any of the numerous sites dedicated to the most unfortunate status updates.
Wall Etiquette: The wall… Back in the days when Facebook kept a running number of posts on someone’s profile, it was all about getting attention and being popular by have the most posts by the most friends than anyone else. Remember when “fishing for comments” was common just to get to the big 1,000? Well now that Facebook removed this popularity contest, the wall represents the user directly rather than their friends’ opinions. When employers or family members stalk a profile they look at posts and no one wants to find a rambling comment about “The Hangover” style weekend they shared. Keep the wall real and keep it you, no one gets offended for deleting the post anyway, and if they do, they’re still upset about the retirement of the old wall.
Privacy: Despite the massive amounts of privacy controls that Facebook has created, most people hardly bother to look at what their profiles look like with a simple Google search. There are an amazing amount of controls available to users that can limit everything from profile accessibility to blocking specific users from seeing a single photo album. Learn em and use em, you never know when someone will come looking for dirt..
