Most people enjoy using social media accounts. Therefore, it’s tempting to use your existing social media profiles for business use. However, social media for business is extremely different than social media for personal use. While the broad concepts are somewhat similar, there are several key differences as the article below will reveal. Below are five reasons to keep your personal and professional social media separate.
1. Maintain Professionalism
A significant reason to keep your personal and professional social media separate is a matter of professionalism. It’s doesn’t look right to be promoting your latest blog post one minute and lamenting cold soup the next. By keeping them separate, you have more freedom to post the things you want to on your personal pages and keep your brand pages focused on things strictly related to your business. There is always the risk of losing business due to your personal views or attitudes. You probably won’t know that is the reason, so merging your personal and professional life together like this always carries an element of risk.
2 Reduce Confusion
Another reason to keep your personal and professional social media separate is to limit name confusion. If someone looks at your profile online and sees a lot of personal content, they may wonder if they have stumbled on the right profile or whether or not there is a separate account for your brand. You also have the problem of whether you use your name or the name of your brand. In most cases, there will be some differences between the two. As always, simple things in marketing is nearly always best, and name confusion could cause more problems than it’s worth.
3. Simpler to Manage
When it comes to managing social media, it’s a lot easier when you have a clear plan for each profile. For simplicity, having personal and professional social media separate gives you that clear plan for content, so you have a general idea on what to post. As ever, this all makes your life easier when looking for the best content and using a scheduling tool. You can also take things further by creating a social media calendar to help you plan things out ahead of time. Sources may be different for personal and professional profiles so you can add those separately to your accounts as needed.
4. Expectations
One critical key to success on social media is letting your followers know what to expect from you. The problem with not keeping your personal and professional social media separate is followers won’t know what to expect from you next. Also, keep in mind that your audience will be different so some users will be following you for your personal content and others for your professional material. Without knowing what is coming next from you, this could lead to users unfollowing you for one reason or another. So, keeping these things consistent helps to simplify matters.
5. Audience Selection
As the previous point suggested, your followers need to know what to expect from you. However, this point should be extended into a marketing consideration. Remember that you may wish to use various forms of social media advertising on different platforms. That means you will wish to boost certain content for increased levels of engagement. The problem with a combined personal and professional social media platform is you won’t always know the users that are engaging with you are relevant for that promotion. However, by separating the accounts, you can be more confident you will reach the right users.
