Don’t Disregard The Professional Aspect Of Social Media

The term ‘social media’ doesn’t really describe all the uses that this phenomenon has been put to. It may have been designed to help people from all corners of the world get in touch with each other, but it is commonly used for professional purposes as well.

As such, it is important to distinguish between the need to be social and the need to be professional. If you try to please both requirements at once, you run the risk of appearing to be a lot less professional than you would like.

A lot of people get round this by having more than one account with those social networking sites they frequent. But you need to check that the rules for each network allow this. If they don’t, you need to decide which route you are going to take, and what is most important to you. It’s fine to be social up to a point – you don’t want to appear distant and unreachable – but you also want to appear as a professional. That is certainly the case if your efforts on the site are to be rewarded in the way you would like.

It can be a fine balance to get this just right. So what do you do if you are unsure of whether a certain action or comment is appropriate under the circumstances? For my money, I would always suggest erring on the side of caution. To put it another way, err on the side of professionalism and you can never go that far wrong.

One of the best ways to learn how to get the balance just right is to see how other people do it. We all follow other people on various social media sites. So which people get your attention for being professional, and where do they draw the line?

Using – and making use of – any social media site is a learning curve. Some seem to scale it more easily than others, and you can learn a lot from them. But the golden rule is never to let the social side of things overwhelm the professional aims you have in mind.

If you do, you will be more likely to become widely known for all the wrong reasons.