How To Use Your Facebook Public Profile

"Public profile" pages are the building blocks of the Facebook universe. Everyone who joins Facebook is required to provide certain information about themselves, and this information gets displayed on their public profile. You can choose to hide some or most of this information by adjusting the privacy settings for your account, although you're probably going to want to make a large part of your information public since you're probably joining Facebook to connect with old friends and make new ones.

If you're joining Facebook for business networking purposes, you'll be faced with a significant decision right away – do you want your profile to be only a tool for business, or do you also want to use your public profile for personal reasons?

Using your public profile for only your business activities will make it easier to stay focused on your reasons for joining Facebook. You'll view your behavior on your public profile page (what you post, the comments you leave for other on other people's pages, etc.) as being similar to your if you were attending a networking event – you want to make connections, and leave people with a favorable impression, and not do anything that would make your company look bad.

You may decide instead that you'd like to have a single public profile for both your business activities and your personal activities. This would be convenient because you'd only need to post messages to a single account, and not have to constantly sign-in and sign-out between the different accounts in order to do your personal and professional Facebook activities. In addition, there might also be opportunities to expand the reach of your business by gently and appropriately promoting it to some of your social contacts.

Some people find that a dual-use Facebook account cramps their style, however. You could find yourself less likely to share links or comment about some of your "guilty pleasures" or things that may seem trivial or silly, for fear that it might damage or weaken the strength of some of your business connections. There are certainly things that we all talk about with our friends that we wouldn't feel comfortable talking about in a professional context.

It is possible to separate your business relationships from your personal relationships within a single public profile by creating a Facebook "list" for each type of connection. You can then post your personal items to a list that's comprised of friends only, and post your business-related items to a list that's made up of your business contacts.

The difficulty is that sometimes it's difficult to remember to make a particular Facebook post to only one list or the other (and inadvertently post something to the wrong list, or to both lists). In addition, maintaining the two different lists may become a burden that takes too much of your time. Finally, since Facebook's rules always seem to be constantly evolving, you'll need to stay up to date on how Facebook expects you to manage your contacts.

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How To Use Your Facebook Public Profile

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