My colleague, Mike Petsalis, recently blogged about keeping private and business email separate, but what about everything else you do online? Here are some tips to help you protect your privacy while using the Internet.
1. Use different networks for different purposes
You can use LinkedIn for business and Facebook for personal. This seems to be a pretty safe and standard approach for a lot of people. After all, LinkedIn just doesn’t lend itself to the more personal information that is expected on Facebook. If you do this, it’s important to warn people in your professional life who are expecting to be accepted as a Facebook friend. In other words, let them know gently that LinkedIn is where you like to do business.
2. Create a Facebook personal profile AND a brand page
You can maintain both a private account and a company page. This way, it’s clear that the latter is for professional networking only. To create a public page simply goes to the Pages section on Facebook. You have the option to create a page as a Business, Company, Public Figure, Brand, or Community Cause. One thing to note, until you have 25 fans you cannot get a custom URL for your page (an important part of your overall branding).
3. Push your business contacts to Twitter
Using Twitter as a professional networking tool and Facebook for personal relationships is also ideal. Since Twitter works best as a public forum, this is a solid approach. The only downside to this option is that your tweeting profile lacks the infrastructure to expand on your business information and history, so it’s limited as a professional tool.
4. Tweak Facebook privacy settings
Go into your Privacy Settings and adjust the options within “Sharing on Facebook.” This way, you can adjust who can see what.
5. Take your private life offline altogether
We have given up a lot of our privacy already. While I have a personal Facebook account, I never share any photos there that I wouldn’t be comfortable showing publicly. I also refuse to broadcast my phone number or address with anyone, and I more-or-less just assume that privacy settings won’t help me that much if someone in my network decides to breach my trust.
If you have any other tips or suggestions, please feel free to send them.
