Your Facebook "Brand"

The problem with Facebook, as many see it, is that its new design and options blur the line between "business" and "personal life." While some individuals embrace this transparency, others have gone out of their way to avoid mixing business life with personal activities. Linda covered how to draw your lines in the sand at Facebook in the previous article with information about privacy settings and filters. In this article, you'll learn more about how to guide and develop your Facebook "brand."

Building Your Strategy

It helps to create a guideline of what you want to accomplish – Do you want to get a job, maintain a place for clients to gather or a place to mingle much like a Chamber meeting or an after-work get-together? It's up to you how you want to design that strategy. While some people believe that Facebook is all about sharing your deepest personal feelings and craziest moments in your life, you may learn that even your most trusted friends don't want to know about that time you ate monkey food out of a cage at the zoo.

Remember – you may set your entire account to private or grant certain individuals permission to view sections of your profile. Alternately, you can put your entire profile on the block for the entire public to view. The latter option could benefit you if you're seeking more visibility in your industry. A benefit from the latter option is that your choice to go public will result in a higher profile ranking for your name in search.

If you already have a Facebook account, you can look back over your past comments, photos and other information, much like Patten did. If you feel overwhelmed with what you might need to hide or eliminate, then start over. If you're new to Facebook, just remember this – if you decide to open your account to the masses, then you need to be mindful of what you share and how that could impact a person's perception of you.

Granted, you can't control everyone's perceptions. And, severely constricting yourself to certain topics and statements also might turn your Facebook presence into a smarmy presence with little depth. But, Facebook offers several ways for you to guide your brand and also to help you present yourself as a person with some depth and passion. These options include Pages, Groups and advertising.

I'll show you how to build your Facebook Pages in the next article. In the meantime, think about how you want to build your brand strategy. This is important work, as you will use that strategy across several social media formats, including Twitter, LinkedIn and other tools like Posterous and Digg.