For some the line between a personal and professional persona is quite blurry and occasionally they do cross, which can have disastrous consequences if each one is not managed correctly.
Real World Social Media
You’re a successful manager of an office. You’re great at motivating people, you have respect from all of your employees; you work hard and are a voice to be listened to. Would you like your staff to know that your wife wears the trousers at home that you’ve an incredible fear of spiders and your teenage children never listen to a word you say?
The respect you’ve worked hard to gain in the workplace would easily wane.
This is why when marketing yourself online it’s important to keep both separate and if information about your personal life must be public it should perfectly reflect the professional image you want to convey.
Of course, a great personality is the key to being able to promote yourself online, and your charisma will attract customers, yet unless you are a celebrity, your daily life won’t.
Even In Social Media You’re Only Human
We are all human, we all have faults, we all have fears yet in business we can’t burden our potential customers or clients with these. They need to feel confident that you will deliver no matter what. As cruel as it sounds, they don’t want to know if you may have trouble meeting a deadline because your child-minders let you down, they only want to receive the finished result, regardless of the obstacles you faced to get there.
Empathy can work in your favour though, for example, if you are selling a service such as accountancy, you can empathise with companies racing to the tax deadline, or if you’re a hairdresser, you can let people know that you’re having a bad hair day so will be wearing your hair up in the salon today.
This all makes you human with characteristics related to the business you’re in rather than delving too deep into the nitty gritty of real life.
All Businesses Are Solution Providers
All businesses are problem solvers, whether you’re offering a service that saves a client time or a product that offers a solution you are the reliable source that takes away frustration and confusion. That’s why you need to present yourself as strong, capable, dependable and professional no matter how nice a client is or how bad your life is. Those who enjoy social media success for professionals understand the fine line between the two and know never to cross it.
To manage both personas, set up different accounts. Keep your personal one as private as you can and restrict it to family and friends you’ve met in real life only.
Then do the opposite for your business profiles, make them public, make them searchable and let everyone know why you’ll enhance their life when they want to buy your services.
If you feel like your professional personas are becoming a little too personal, you may want to ask social media experts to manage these pages for you, to maintain your professionalism effortlessly.
