How have you used Facebook in both your Business and Personal life?

Now that over 500 million people are using Facebook on a day to day basis this social networking site has surpassed Google as the number one most visited site on the Internet. With that many people using this site it makes you wonder just what are people actually posting and utilizing their Facebook account for? Since it's inception in 2004 people have been using Facebook as a personal means to communicate with lost friends and classmates, post family photos and upload video clips of events. From a personal user view it has changed the way we communicate and network with our fellow peers, but from a business perspective Facebook has opened up a whole new serious of questions. One of the main ones being perception, perception from a customers point of view and one from their employees. With most of a companies employees now on Facebook how does a business address those who push the boundaries of what is alright to be shared publicly or kept private regarding both their personal and or business lives. Not sure where I'm going with this, well here's an example: You are a counselor that works with substance abuse organization but decide you and your friends are going to have a night out on the town and want to post your ramblings and photographic evidence online to show all your friends the curtails of your adventures that you and your buddies had that night. Now I know people are going to say that what you do after hours does not and should not affect who and what you are when you are at work and for the most part I agree with this statement, as we all need to be able to relax and spend time away from work. Yet, say some of the people that you have helped and consider you a close mentor to their help to recovery see your posts and pictures. What if they feel taken back by how you act personally vs. how you act professionally and no longer carry that same respect for you and or your company. Is there a possibility that what you post on your personal Facebook account can have an affect on the business you represent? The answer is Yes, now it seems like the majority of the people on Facebook do understand this and keep things light hearted and casual but there are those out there that use their Facebook account as some sort of therapeutic outlet to vent how they feel on almost a minute by minute basis. Those are the same people who blur the line between what's safe to post and what is pushing the limit in sometimes both their professional and personal lives.

Facebook from a business perspective has allowed companies to reach out to potential customers and clients with the creation of pages that allows a company to post information, images and notes similar to those with a personal account. Businesses can purchase ad space and new in 2011 can target those who have previously liked your ad to share amongst people that are on their friends list. In today's world companies are using social sites like Facebook to tie their business website into, creating a synergistic network that moves information across multiple platforms from a single source. This extends the reach of what was once a limited audience of site viewers to now a nearly unlimited amount of potential viewers that know the second a website, service and or product is launched and can comment back giving the company instant feedback. Information that has before in the past only been able to be collected from using smaller testing groups or months after a product or service is launched. Facebook has changed the way we interact with businesses and businesses have changed the way they interact with customers, creating an almost personal approach to how they market and deliver their products. One great example was Hurley, rather than create 10 different men's swim/board shorts for a particular model they made mock-ups and used user comments to narrow it down to a single garment that users said would be the one they were more opt to purchase. This style of interaction and feedback not only saved the company in potentially lost revenue it helped the end user feel like they were apart of something by being one of those who felt that their opinion swayed the vote one way or another.

Facebook has become apart of so many peoples lives now adays that no matter where you go or what you are doing you will find someone utilizing the site, either from their computer or a mobile device. Facebook has changed to way we interact with the world and has allowed us to expand our reach to communicate and network with more than just our closed circle of peers. We are just starting to learn the affects of what it means to be this socially connected and in some ways we are having to relearn how to interact with others using this different medium. With that some of us need to be more mindful of what is expressed on the site and know that what gets posted on Facebook really is the writing on the "Wall".