Would these N.B. Professionals Accept Your Facebook Friend Request?
In my job, I talk to people every day.
These conversations are foundations of all of my stories. They are informative, meaningful and truly help me get to know and understand New Brunswick’s business community and those who are a part of it, better.
But what do I do when those people want to get to know ME better?
Sources (ie: the people I interview) friending me on Facebook has become a very common occurrence over the last few years. Also, people who I have never even spoken to or heard of in my life adding me because they know others in my professional network is also becoming more common.
Maybe I overthink it too much, but I’m never quite sure what’s the right way to respond, not just ethically, but personally. Wasn’t LinkedIn invented to solve this problem?
It’s not that I have anything to hide. I don’t post anything outrageous or embarrassing on social media. Of course, I know better than that, but it still makes me feel a little uneasy.
Am I ok with someone who I spoke to once, and in some cases, never met in person, being able to go through all my photos as far back as my high school prom and beyond?
Am I cool with them seeing pictures of me at friends’ bachelorette parties or throwing back beers during my summer vacation?
Am I burning professional bridges if they discover that I have potty mouth outside of work? Shit if I know.
So far, I’ve just gone with my gut. Some people I accept, some I don’t. I do what feels comfortable. This method hasn’t backfired, yet.
Though in a perfect world I’d keep all my professional connections solely on LinkedIn, I realize that in business, everything is linked. The personal is professional and the professional is now personal. Everything has merged.
I was curious if other New Brunswick professionals and business people shared similar feelings. So I decided to ask them of them.
I asked if they thought Facebook is a professional network. If not, why? And if yes, how exactly do they use it for that?
Spoiler: They all said yes, but I found both their reasons why and how they used it interesting.
Here is what they said:
Natalie Davison, co-founder and principal at Marrow
“With the rise of personal branding and the importance of human connection in marketing, the clear lines that we used to draw between personal and professional lives have blurred. More than ever, our clients are looking to feel a connection to the people in our organizations. Facebook is a platform that users come to for the purpose of meaningful connections with other people – both personally and professionally.
Further, anyone can screenshot and share. So the assumption that you can post something online – on any platform – and assume that it won’t spill into your professional domain is very risky.
As a business owner, I leverage Facebook’s business tools like Pages and Groups but I also use my personal account to distribute content from my business page. Someone who is my Facebook “friend” is much more likely to engage with our content than someone who is a Facebook Page “Fan”.
The Facebook algorithm favours person-to-person interactions over person-to-page interactions. This means that any content I post on my page will rank higher in the algorithm if I share to my personal page and create a conversation as “Natalie” rather than just posting on the Page feed and speaking as “Marrow”.
Additionally, I’ve set clear boundaries around my personal brand. For example, I share about my life as a working mom of twins because that is a conversation that I’m ready to have publicly. There are other parts of my personal life that I’m not willing to discuss publicly – those don’t make it onto Facebook.
Overall, we are craving more humanity in business and that is an incredibly good thing! But it also means that we need to take the time to consider our own boundaries and decide what parts of our own stories we are comfortable sharing with the world.”
David Alston, owner of TimberTop Adventures and New Brunswick’s Entrepreneur in Residence
“For me sometimes my business connections are my friendships as well. I often really don’t see any hard line drawn between those two worlds and generally I’m perfectly fine for business connections to get to know the real me via what I share on Facebook. However, for the most part, I use LinkedIn as my go-to professional network for any new connections I make throughout the week.
In terms of using Facebook for professional purposes, we do use the private group functionality that Facebook offers for all of our staff communications at TimberTop Adventures, often putting out multiple posts per day. We share good news stories on staff accomplishments, customer feedback, new policy and procedure changes, staff schedules, training videos etc. It was also a great way for us to build our company culture with staff after they were hired but even before they officially started with us this summer. It’s also become a great corporate history book of sorts as it now holds many of the company milestones that we can look back on someday to see how far we’ve all come as a team.”
Nadine Duguay, CEO of Dialogue NB
“Facebook is not a professional network but it can be used as such. This can be seen in the following ways: Organizations have an FB page to engage with their target market and attract more people to their brand or organizational leaders will share the content of their professional page on their personal profile to increase market reach. The fact that Facebook is the most used network by New Brunswickers is also one of the main reasons why it is used this way; at last count, over 575,000 New Brunswickers had an active Facebook account, which is well over 75 per cent of users. Therefore, if you are an organization that wants or needs to reach New Brunswick market, Facebook is an essential platform that cannot be avoided.”
Andrew Bedford, CEO of Hartt Shoes
“Business is all about relationships and relationships are what Facebook is all about. We do business with people we know and trust. As entrepreneurs and leaders, it is important that we stay connected into our communities and Facebook is one of the easiest ways to accomplish this.
However, I also think people have their own style of doing things and part of being a digital citizen is understanding how people like to communicate. As with any community, its all about respect.”
Don Darling, Mayor of the City of Saint John:
“I say for me, I use Facebook in particular and all of the social channels. I would use them for a real mix. Everything from a picture of my dog, like any sort of private citizen would use it, but I most definitely use Facebook to share and enter into dialogue when it comes to city business. It’s an important tool that I use. It allows me to reach a lot of people.
For example, this last week I asked a question around people’s concerns or issues or topics they would like to discuss which will inform me for Facebook Live or what I call a ‘virtual town hall meeting’ I’ll hold sometime this week. Sometimes I share budget information, so I do use it quite extensively to help inform people about city business and what’s going on. Also to bridge, if you will, but some media coverage. You only have so many words, you only have so many minutes, so it really allows me to have a more lengthy conversation with people about issues.
It’s a conduit and it goes in both directions. It’s good, because it allows me to interact with people, but it obviously gives them a conduit to get to me as well.”
Sally Ng, founder & CEO at The Triple Effect & DigiLearn
“In today’s world, our professional and personal worlds are merging or have merged, no matter if we like it or not. Facebook has more than 2.2 billion users, that’s 30 per cent of the world’s population. We need to treat it as a professional network, to help build the brands of our companies, individuals and even recruiting employees. In my opinion, it’s impossible to not see it as a professional network with the amount of active users on it who are being serves ads, deals, etc.”
Mark Leger, Editor, Huddle
“I’m the polar opposite of Cherise. Facebook is Huddle’s biggest distribution channel, and I’ve become fully immersed (some might say shamelessly so!) personally and professionally. I reach out to sources and sometimes do short interviews on Messenger. I post our stories to groups and take an active part in discussions there. I send out Friend requests to the sources for my stories and the sources in the stories that Cherise and Inda Intiar write. Most of the time, they accept. I troll through my Friend list every once in a while and ask them to “like” Huddle’s Facebook page. I have many “friends” on Facebooks but I also see it as a community and professional network much like LinkendIn. My apologies to my friends and professional contacts for all the pictures of my kids and cats.”