When it comes to social sites, keeping your personal and business accounts separate is a good idea. After all, you don’t want to bore your close family and friends with endless business related posts, nor would you want the general public to have access to your vacation pictures. However, it is important that you realize the usefulness of using your personal account to grow your network to positively affect your work or business.
While it is still best to keep your social and business account separate, you need to make sure that your personal social accounts are reflective of you as a brand. This means not putting up anything that you think can compromise you, and more importantly making sure that your personal account shows a side of you that is complementary to your business side. After all, you don’t know if any of your personal posts will leak out, so you want everything your put on the Internet to be something that will help build your reputation.
You can also use your personal account to grow your network by adding and/or “important” people in the industry as your friend/contact/follower. This way you can start developing a “closer” online relationship with them, which might help your business in the future.
You can also sometimes opt to share important business or industry related posts to the public by tweaking your sharing options. In Facebook, this can be easily done since you can always control who can view your posts. Show the world the “expert” side of you by allowing the public to view non-personal posts. If your family finds such posts a bore, you can just exclude them from seeing such posts so that your personal account still feels very personal to them, but can still be used as a tool for building your personal brand.
Always stick to using your company or business page as your primary way of connecting with your customers, but don’t miss out on opportunities to further build your personal brand by supplementing them with public posts via your personal account.
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