Two Features That Would Help Bring More Professionals to Facebook
Last week one of my buddies had a conundrum that he threw out to the crew over beers. His issue was that his boss sent him a friend invite on Facebook and wanted to know what he should do. He likes his boss but he was really concerned about personal life, which he primarily associates with Facebook, colliding with his professional world. Sometime you want to vent about work to friends and family. What if one of his friends posts a party picture or a picture from college that’s fun but not all that professional?
The suggestion we had was to create a separate group for business contacts with limited access to your posts and any pictures or videos of you by friends. Jeremiah Owyang wrote a post about this titled, “Help! My Boss Wants To Be My Friend On Facebook.”
The problem that I and others still have is that with all of the various privacy settings with Facebook, it’s hard to be sure exactly what the groups you set up can or can’t see without having a friend next to you and putting them in each group to see what they see through their profile.
There are two features that I think would be incredibly helpful to getting more professional and business relationships on Facebook as well as more interaction with people that may want to keep communication with different groups of friends separate.
- Allow users to send posts specifically to certain groups. I’m well aware that my friends and family do not want to hear my professional interactions. For that reason, I tend to do very little posts on Facebook regarding my business. I also don’t want a business contact that I don’t really know reading a joking comment I make to a friend out of context. Allowing me to send posts to a specific group would allow me to interact more with both my professional contacts and my friends and family and that means more time on Facebook.
- Allow users to “View my profile for this friend group”. Instead of me guessing or using a friend’s user login to test what each of my user groups have access to, it would make it much easier if Facebook offered a way for me to quickly and easily view what my profile looks like for each friend group I create. Knowing exactly what each group sees would also allow me to feel more comfortable interacting even more on Facebook.
These are the features that I believe will not only help build more business communication on Facebook but more user interaction and time spent on the platform overall.
