Facebook and the Professional World

03Nov09

I’ve had a Facebook page since I was an 18 year old entering college (when Facebook was for college students only). As a young women with an active and sometimes crazy social life, I have over 1300 pictures tagged of me. I’ve always enjoyed sharing these with family and friends and having the ability to look back on my four years at Loyola and relive some of the amazing times.

But let’s face it. Facebook isn’t what it was when I first started using it. My future boss probably has a Facebook. Co-workers and professors have Facebook. So the looming question is…do I keep Facebook as my personal social network and be very careful who I let in to see my page?

I’ve had several jobs and internships where I have let co-workers and even my boss become my friends. I was hesitant to deny the request, so instead, I put them on “Limited Profile,” so they could only see the information that I allowed them to see. Needless to say, I choose not to allow them access to my photos and in some cases, didn’t even allow access to see my wall posts. Thus, it was pretty pointless that we were even friends in the first place, considering all they could see was my profile picture, name and basic information.

My generation is getting consistent reminders and warnings about keeping “bad” pictures off the internet and making sure we maintain a professional image online. All completely understandable.

But we’re human. We’re social creatures. Does a picture of me and a few friends out at a bar make me a bad prospective employee?

And when we do accept requests from people in our professional world and block things like photos and wall posts, does that send even more of a negative image of ourselves? As if we are hiding things?

I’m torn. What do you think?

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