On Social Media, You Are the Company You Keep

  • 1 min read


Are you wondering how to best balance personal and professional business connections on social media? If your personal connections are in stark contrast to your personal brand for business, the answer may be that you cannot.

According to Careerbuilder.com, over 65 percent of employers check social media profiles as part of the job screening process. While profiles sprinkled with profanity and inappropriate pictures rank high in discouraging hiring managers, items posted by friends can also play a factor, especially on Facebook.

For small business owners, potential customers may easily become irritated or even offended by posts shared on Facebook timelines by friends that could be construed as offensive. In a poll on my own Facebook timeline, I asked Facebook friends if users are responsible for what their friends post on their walls. The debate heated rather rapidly, with an overwhelming number of responses. While several friends commented that they did not judgepeople on Facebook by items their friends posted, the majority felt that it is the responsibility of the profileowner, if not to censor, then to correct friends who post tastelessly. Otherwise, it appears that the profileowner condones the views and behaviors shared.

If you plan to interact with personal and professional friends via social media, use the following tips:

  1. Filter friend requests closely. Do not accept personal friends who lack discretion as social media connections on networks that you are using primarily for business and/or job search. You don’t have to reply that you will not accept them, you can simply ignore their request. However, if a connection confronts you about it, openly share that you are using social media primarily for business and offer to meet with them for coffee or lunch.
  2. Censor and/or correct whenever necessary. If a connection comments inappropriately on your update or shares something that could compromise your professional image and personal brand, feel free to correct them in the post or simply remove it. There is a difference between difference of opinions and posting something that would obviously be seen as distasteful to hiring managers and potential customers.
  3. Do not hesitate to unfriend. If you practice tip number one judiciously, this will very rarely be an issue. However, in the event that you have a connection who insists upon being insensitive to the fact that you are building a business presence on social media, it would be to your benefit to disconnect.

Do you believe a person’s social media connections reflect on them personally? Why or why not?

Picture of Crystal Washington

Crystal Washington

Crystal Washington is a social media marketing strategist, speaker, co-founder of Socialtunities—a social media instruction brand that trains Gen Ys-Boomers on the strategic use of social media, and the author of The Social Media WHY: A Busy Professional’s Practical Guide to Using Social Media. She is hired by corporations and associations around the globe to provide keynotes, workshops, and webinars.

TRENDING AROUND THE WEB

A large-scale field study using real-world healthcare data found no measurable evidence that medical professionals make worse decisions as their workday wears on, directly contradicting one of the most frequently repeated claims in modern popular psychology writing

A large-scale field study using real-world healthcare data found no measurable evidence that medical professionals make worse decisions as their workday wears on, directly contradicting one of the most frequently repeated claims in modern popular psychology writing

The Blog Herald
University of Arizona researchers wired 79 people with a recorder sampling conversations every 12.5 minutes for four days and found the happiest had twice as many substantive conversations and a third as much small talk as the unhappiest, suggesting the discomfort was never a social deficit.

University of Arizona researchers wired 79 people with a recorder sampling conversations every 12.5 minutes for four days and found the happiest had twice as many substantive conversations and a third as much small talk as the unhappiest, suggesting the discomfort was never a social deficit.

Global English Editing
A landmark study found that Catholic nuns who wrote sparse, simple autobiographies in their early twenties, when they entered the convent in the 1930s, were far more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease roughly six decades later, with about 80 percent of the low-complexity writers eventually developing the disease compared to only 10 percent of those whose youthful essays were dense with ideas

A landmark study found that Catholic nuns who wrote sparse, simple autobiographies in their early twenties, when they entered the convent in the 1930s, were far more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease roughly six decades later, with about 80 percent of the low-complexity writers eventually developing the disease compared to only 10 percent of those whose youthful essays were dense with ideas

Global English Editing
Researchers reported in 2026 that they could plant a specific unsolved puzzle into a person’s dreams during REM sleep, and volunteers who dreamed about that puzzle were measurably more likely to solve it after waking up than volunteers who did not

Researchers reported in 2026 that they could plant a specific unsolved puzzle into a person’s dreams during REM sleep, and volunteers who dreamed about that puzzle were measurably more likely to solve it after waking up than volunteers who did not

The Blog Herald
Jordan Peterson opens Rule 6 of “12 Rules for Life” by asking, “If you can’t even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?” — arguing that the discipline to fix a small mess is the same discipline a marriage, a career, or a country eventually demands.

Jordan Peterson opens Rule 6 of “12 Rules for Life” by asking, “If you can’t even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?” — arguing that the discipline to fix a small mess is the same discipline a marriage, a career, or a country eventually demands.

Global English Editing
Happier people spent more time in meaningful conversation, a recorder study found, and when a larger study checked, that link held and the case against small talk did not

Happier people spent more time in meaningful conversation, a recorder study found, and when a larger study checked, that link held and the case against small talk did not

The Vessel
Load more
CATEGORIES
Explore