Pause Before You Post: A Facebook Rule of Thumb

I think we can all agree that Facebook was created to be a personal social network more so than a business social network. That has long been reserved for LinkedIn (or so that’s what I think). But now we have business Facebook pages, Facebook ads–the need to be liked on two levels both personally and professionally. On top of that, we have the issue of what to post, who to friend, who likes us, how many likes makes our business socially accepted, etc. The list could go on and on. Andrea and I both have personal Facebook pages and we both maintain Monarch’s Facebook page. We have seen peers post politically charged comments on both their personal and professional pages, and given the political atmosphere it’s not hard to have something to talk about. When we see one of these posts, we will usually have a conversation that goes something like this, “Did you see what so-and-so posted? Wow, what were they thinking? Let’s not do that.”

If you’re a business of one, does your personal page differ in tone and style from your business page? Ours certainly does, but we do have a hard and fast rule that we use for both personal pages and the business page. Never post anything you wouldn’t say in a group of your peers. I like to think of my friends list and then I think of my oldest friend who is well into their 80s. Before I post anything, I think of how this person will receive my post. If I think they will receive it positively, then the post goes up. If not, then I keep it to myself. We were wondering what your rule of thumb is for posting on your personal and business Facebook pages?

— Chellie Thompson, Cofounder, Monarch Media & Consulting, Inc.