Introducing a new blog series, Carter’s Top Five!

This week: the top five reasons you should not befriend your colleagues on your social media cache.

 1. Your contemporaries will not be the ones hiring you. For an effective social media presence, you need to market – not network. Putting yourself in front of your target market is what makes for a successful online campaign, not friends and colleagues.

 2. Restricting your connections on your social media accounts to potential customers ensures that you do not cross the line that separates the personal and the professional. Those seeking your services don’t care about your weekend plans or your burrito preferences (unless of course you dislike burritos, in which case they shouldn’t be doing business with you anyway).

 3. When you stockpile your social media connections with colleagues and professional cohorts, you open yourself up to possibly losing lucrative business to those same associates. Consider it free advertising.

 4. Your messaging strategy and content should be vastly different between your personal and professional accounts. If it’s not, you need to go back to Social Media Messaging 101. Your friends should see one thing, and your customers another.  

 5. Social media outlets present an excellent opportunity to subtly promote your brand: such as company colors and themes, which you should highlight via your default picture and cover photo. These will vary greatly between your social media accounts for entertainment and your accounts for business.