At our recent sales conference (Winterfest) in Salt Lake City, much of the conversation focused on social media and how we can use it to communicate with customers and grow our collective business. One of the most interesting dialogues was about the challenge of separating personal and business social media. It was apparent to me that people fall into three camps when it comes to this issue:
 

  1. Complete integration of personal and business social media.
  2. A happy medium of mixing personal and business social media; but still some separation between the two.
  3. Complete separation between personal and business social media.


Another interesting thing was that when we talked about social media, many people gravitated right to Facebook and/or Twitter. The concept of social media incorporates a list of methods including:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Linked In
  • Blogs
  • You Tube
  • Many others


And, with all of these types of social media; how does one keep on top of it all and keep it separate?

Thoughts:

  1. Social media is a personal preference that varies from one person to another. Each of us decides how much or how little social media we desire. It’s OK not to engage in much social media; it’s also OK to go over the top.
  2. Design your social media plan. You should decide how much, what type and your personal/business separation plans for social media. You don’t want to get into a position where you discover that your personal and business media is so intertwined that you can no longer separate it.
  3. In terms of micro-blogging, one concept is to use Facebook for personal and Linked In for business.
  4. Use one social media site to feed other social media sites. Examples: When this blog post is published it is immediately published on Twitter and the Listen fan page on Facebook. On Linked In you can publish your post automatically to Twitter.
  5. Use multiple methods to access social media including your computer and your phone. Most social media sites allow you to set text message alerts on certain posts.
  6. You can use RSS feeds to send social media right to your email where you can selectively look at posts that interest you.


Here’s an interesting video on social media I found at Common Craft: Social Media in Plain English.