Facebook is a great tool for staying in touch with friends, and it’s also a great tool for connecting with your business’ customers. But it can also be a little tricky to use it for both business and yournprivate life at the same time, without getting some crossover between the two.
Your personal updates, for example, probably won’t be of interest to your customers, and your friends and family might get sick of seeing posts and updates about your business. So how do you keep the two separate?
Facebook does not allow more than one account
Logically, the easiest solution would be to set up two separate accounts – a personal account and a business account, but this is actually against Facebook’s terms of service – they only allow one account per person.
Set up lists
Another option that allows you to keep your busiess and personal lives separate on Facebook is to set up separate lists and sort your Facebook “friends” according to the context. For example, you could make a “Business” list and a “Personal” list and add people to the appropriate one.
When you post something, you can either send it to all your friends or you can pick a specific list to send it to. If you post something to your Personal list, the people on your Business list wouldn’t see it, and vice versa.
This keeps things nicely separated, but you need to remember to specify a list to send it to. If you forget that step when you post something, it will go out to all your Facebook “friends”.
Facebook limits the number of friends you can have
Another potential problem with using lists is that Facebook limits everyone to 5,000 friends. There obviously aren’t too many people who are going to have that many friends, but if you’re using Facebook for business you will soon start to add a lot of friends, and it does add uo after a while.
Set up a Facebook fan page – they have no friends limit
One way around the friends limitations is to set up a Facebook Fan page instead of adding everyone to a list, because Facebook fan pages don’t have a limit.
Using a fan page will also keep your personal and business interactions even more independent of one another.
Have a look at mobile network Three’s Facebook page to have a look at what can be achieved with a fan page, and get tips from other business mums.
Another option
Facebook recently added the ability to “Use Facebook as a page” which means that everything you do will appear to be coming from you Facebook fan page rather than your personal profile.
This means that if you log in as your Facebook fan page, all your business-related interactions can be handled while you’re active as your Page, and any personal interactions can be done while you’re logged in with your personal profile.
