I’ve had a Facebook account for ages, but only recently – at the request of a friend – have I actually started paying attention to it. On one level, it’s great. Like most people, I don’t do a very good job of keeping track of my friends’ lives, especially those who live on the other side of the country. And extended family? Forget it. I have a cousin who was less than a month away from giving birth to her second child before I even heard that she was pregnant.
Now, with a quick skim of my Facebook page, I can see pictures from a cousin’s daughter’s first birthday party, know the whereabouts of a friend with a brutal professional travel schedule, or coordinate a dinner among eight friends without an endless email thread. It’s great.
But there’s a flip side to Facebook. I get dozens of application requests every day. “Your friend pelted you with a snowball! Allow us to access your personal information and hit her back!” Not only do I not have the time to respond to every poke, snowball, potted plant, drink and nicest person request, I also don’t understand why anyone would want to spend their time sending me these things in the first place.
Whenever you get a group of professionals together, there’s endless discussion about social media. “Use your Facebook page as a marketing tool,” they say. While I understand that with my blog, LinkedIn, or even with Twitter, Facebook just feels too personal to use in a professional capacity. Do my clients want to see pictures of my family? Even if they want to, should I let them?
Because even with the people I connect to – people that I know well and care about – I have to admit that in some cases I’ve learned far more than I wanted to. Extended family members have shared way too much information about their sex life. I’ve been more than a bit disturbed to see that someone I’ve long known to have a drinking problem openly admit to getting trashed twice midweek. And all of this happened within comments on my page, making that public information to anyone who is connected to me. It’s more information than I feel like I have any business knowing, and not the sort of information that I would want my clients to have access to.
So for now, I’ll limit my professional use to blogging, LinkedIn and Twitter until I can figure out what benefit, if any, exists for my clients through Facebook.
I love your comments about Facebook and I totally agree. I find Facebook to be the least valuable and pertinent of the tools available, and like you am annoyed by all of the weird games, pokes, notes and candy that seem to be spread by people without jobs. The only good part is the ability to connect to old friends from high school and college, but it is not worth my time otherwise. LinkedIn has been absolutely amazing as a way to foster and promote business opportunities.