Ellie Mirman's Startup Marketing Blog

Social Networks - Business or Pleasure?

Posted by Ellie Mirman

Jun 12, 2008

I was recently posed the question: do you use social networks for business or personal purposes?

It's taken me a little while to really accept that there isn't a clear delineation between my "business" and "personal" life. My different contacts function on both levels - I have business contacts with whom I go out for drinks, catch up on weekend funtivities, and I have personal contacts with whom I discuss more "business" topics. In general, if I had to divide all my contacts into one bucket or the other, I would have quite a few I wouldn't know what to do with. Well, we met at a conference (business), but we talked about Boston Sports (personal) and social networking (see title of this post).

Relationships are relationships. It's not about classifying them into one bucket or another. 

What I think an interested question is: do you use particular social networks particularly for business vs personal purposes? Back even just a few months ago, I pictured LinkedIn as the place for my professional networking, while Facebook would be reserved for my personal networking. Today this isn't the case. While LinkedIn hasn't changed that much (though it has made some nice improvements over the past few months), Facebook has successfully moved in on my professional network. Pretty much everyone at my company is on Facebook, and a lot of the people I've met through work / conferences / etc. I've also been able to friend on Facebook. This is pretty consistent with my view that I probably wouldn't even be able to separate out my business contacts for one network vs. my personal contacts for another. But: why in the world do we need so many identical networks if each serves all our contacts in the same way?

 

Topics: social media

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