In this tutorial we see a method to organize and segment Facebook contacts if you use a professional profile for both leisure and work.
Profiles and pages on Facebook
By now we should all know that there are profiles and pages on Facebook. And that as a general rule, natural persons must use profiles, while businesses should use pages.
If you want to know how take a look at . That is the path any company should take. If you do not have it mounted like this, I recommend you as soon as possible.
Well, it is clear that the profiles are for people and the pages for companies But what if you are both? What if you are self employed? What happens if you only work with personal branding?
So we have a problem, because you are going to have a mixture of friends, family, clients, suppliers and colleagues from the sector in your account, which is not very good, since your clients will not care very much if you are having a paella in the beach, and your friends will care even less if you’ve written a new article about who-knows-what history of your niche market.
If you work as a page, you can, but in the case of a personal profile, you can’t do the same.
That target icon that we can see in the image above does not appear in our profile status updates, as we can see here:
So what do we do? No problem, because we have a very powerful alternative that can help us a lot. Let’s see it.
“Professional profile” on Facebook
In principle, the profile is intended for personal use. But as we say, in some cases we can also use it professionally. Even if we are not self-employed, it may be that some clients, suppliers or colleagues ask us for friendship. What do we do in those cases?
If we deny them friendship, we have two potential problems. On the one hand, they may take it badly, and consider us rude. And on the other hand, we may be losing certain connections, contacts and conversions. A pity.
And if we accept the friendship, we have the problem of privacy. It is normal that we do not want to share personal family photos with clients and suppliers.
So, the solution lies in a functionality that suits us like a glove: Friends lists. We can access these , and we will see something similar to this:
The concept is very similar (and copied) from the circles of Google Plus. Some of these lists we have all created by default, such as “Work” or “Best friends”. But we can also create as many as we want by clicking on the button on the top right.
For example, if I want to create a friends list that is for all listeners of , I would do something like this:
How can we organize our friends in those lists? Well, we basically have three options.
Organize Facebook friends with lists
The first method is usually the most comfortable when someone asks us for a new friendship. At that moment we can choose in which list we classify it:
This method is the fastest for new friends, but another option is to do it with existing ones. To do this we just have to go to their profile and select the list that is displayed when selecting the “Friends” button:
Finally, we have the option to manage friends from the list itself, in the upper right:
There we will have the option to select which friends to add or remove from each list quickly and comfortably.
Segment your updates by friend lists
If you have never used these lists, it will take a little time the first time. (or a lot, it depends on how many friends you have) organize everything.
You must go friend by friend, and select which list or lists they belong to, since the same person can be on several of them. But when you have done it, then it’s a moment, because you just have to go classifying the new friendships as we have seen before
And why bother doing all this? Just to have everything sorted? No, of course not. The grace is to be able to segment everything that we are going to publish. How? Well, a picture is worth a thousand words:
In this way we can choose who can see what we publish. That we publish a photo of the little ones? Let the family see it. That we publish an article on work issues? Let the customers see it. A photo of kittens? Well, everyone, of course.
Thanks to this method, we not only preserve our privacy and show each segment what interests them the most, but we also manage to maintain .
At any time we can modify the segmentation, in case we have forgotten to do it, we have made a mistake, or we simply want to segment old updates. No problem, everything allowed.
A little trick that will help us to see if everything works as we want and that we are really segmenting our content is the functionality of Facebook that allows us to see our profile as another person. We have it in our profile, in “See as”.
So we can see what our friends, family, acquaintances, customers, suppliers, etc. see. In the case of , you can create not only the “work” list, but you can go much further and create more specific lists, such as:
- Current customers
- old clients
- Potential customers
- unknown
- Suppliers
- Collaborators
- network connections
- Etc
what are you doing promotion for new customers? Show it only to potentials! The rest will not be able to take advantage of it. What are you looking for someone to outsource a job? Be seen by collaborators or network connections. We could even filter by age groups or sex, imagination to power.
As you can see, there are many possibilities, and it’s up to you how far you want to go, but in any case, and whatever you do, it will surely be better than a simple rejection of a friend proposal 🙂
Summary and conclusion
Facebook allows us to create “friend lists” that we can use to segment our publications if we use our personal profile also in a professional way.
The first time it takes a little time to organize everyone into lists, but then it’s very simple, and that allows us to choose who can see each status update.
If you want to know more about Facebook, Edgerank segmentations and everything related to social networks, I recommend that you subscribe to , available both on and on . Every day, at 07:07, a serving of 20 minutes of online marketing 🙂
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