Facebook

Creating a Professional Facebook Account

I like to keep things separated in my life. Work and personal items have their own places in my apartment as well as online. If I needed a facebook presence using something other than a page, I would create a professional account so as to not muddy up my personal account with privacy settings etc. So to create a professional facebook account, you’ll need to do a couple of things.

Note: if you don’t want to put the effort into switching from account to account, just adjust your privacy settings to keep all notifications related to your account away from your friends. I don’t like this option, because the whole point of a professional facebook account is to be in front of the prospective student/whoever as much as possible.

Facebook doesn’t allow for organization type names on your account. So you’ll need to be real when filling out the biographical information. In other words, don’t make your first name, “Admissions Counselor” and last name, “Tim Cox.” Just put fill out the information just as you would a personal account but register with an email that represents your professionalness. If you have a email connected to your business that you didn’t use to sign up for a personal facebook account, use that. If you, like many others, used your .edu email for your personal account back when only college students could sign up for the service, create a free email account that is obviously related to your work. For my office at PBA, I created an email account for each admission counselor with gmail. Thus, my login to facebook for my pba account used the email pbatim@gmail.com . Then, I make the login information known to those in my office in case I need them to login and do stuff for me when I’m away from the computer (though I could just use my phone).

The only con to this is that you may have students trying to befriend your personal account and personal friends trying to befriend your personal account. Just reject their friendship and go find them with the correctly corresponding account.

There’s your tip. Is this something that you would use in your office? If you’re not using facebook, why not?

© 2008 Tim Cox.