Adam Snider is a freelance writer and marketing professional who lives in Edmonton. He can be found on Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter and his at AdamSnider.com.

Farmville rendered in cake. Photo by Semivi, via Flickr.

For a lot of people, social media is nothing more than a pleasant distraction. It’s a way of socializing with friends and sneaking in a few minutes of Farmville when the boss isn’t looking. But for the savvy professional, social media is also a tool that can help build professional networks as well as it can social ones.

There is, of course, a social network specifically designed for professional networking, LinkedIn, but at only 50 million users (as of October 2009) compared to Facebook’s more than 300 million active users, it shouldn’t be treated as your only professional networking website. Despite its reputation as a time waster and  productivity killer, Facebook is where you need to be if you’re serious about online networking.

If you’re already on Facebook odds are that you’ve got a fair amount of personal information, pictures, wall posts from friends, etc.,that you might not feel comfortable sharing with your professional contacts. But, unless you’ve got something truly embarrassing on your Facebook profile, there’s no need to delete anything (and if you do, maybe you need to be reminded to never post anything online that you wouldn’t want a current or potential employer to see).

Facebook’s privacy settings allow you to determine exactly what gets shared with whom. If you use your privacy settings properly, you can control exactly how much personal information that your professional contacts are able to see. At AllFacebook there a great article about Facebook privacy settings that every Facebook user should know, even if you aren’t using the site for professional networking.

The most useful tip, from which the rest follow, is to make use of Facebook’s Friend Lists. I wasn’t even aware that this option existed, until I read AllFacebook’s article and I suspect that I’m not the only one. Friend Lists allow you to group your Facebook friends into different categories, a typical setup would be lists for contacts identified as Friends, Family, and Professional.

Once you have your lists setup, you can build your privacy settings around them. If you don’t want your professional contacts to see tagged pictures of you, you can adjust your privacy settings so that the Professional list is excluded from seeing them. Similar settings can be made to exclude your professional contacts from seeing anything else that you might deem too personal. (For in-depth instructions on using these privacy settings, view the AllFacebook.com article.)

By making the most of Facebook’s privacy settings, you can add your boss, co-workers, and other professional contacts without having to worry about them seeing the photo from last weekend’s party that your friend decided to upload and tag you in. You’ll be able to continue using Facebook for socialization and entertainment without giving up on the huge networking potential that comes with having an account on the world’s most popular social networking site.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 6:38 am and is filed under Daily Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.