Don't do it...

[Lynn Morton]

Don't create two Facebook accounts.

Seriously.

It may seem like a good idea, but once you have two, they are entirely too hard to maintain and still seem like a "real" person.

Just my 2 cents. :)

~Lynn

[Lynn Morton]

Deirdre - I regret not having just used my personal account in the first place. I love that social media is letting me be more accepting of who I am and be able to present the whole picture of who I am in a personal space, I just wish I had had the guts to embrace that from the get-go.

Maggie - Using my "professional" profile is interesting, I get a LOT of crossover, especially from my friends in Seattle, I just hope I'm not confusing them! Since AAPA is using groups and pages, having a face (and a fun picture!) to associate with a staff member is helpful. My hope is that neither profile is shut down since I do use them in two different ways (like recently importing my theatre blog into my personal account and my SNAP blog into my professional one), I have two different focuses, but I am definitely stretched thin in being personally charming on both. ;)

[Maggie McGary]

Yikes--while I agree in principle, I admit I have two accounts ;)

I did it initially because when I first set up a group for our association on Facebook, it was before I knew about pages versus groups and of course groups have to be associated with a person--that person being me. We were being very tentative about it, and I really didn't think it would be appropriate for me to be the one to put myself out there as the face of the association since I already had an active personal presence on Facebook. It would have been different if social media weren't so new and so tentative now, with people not really being sure it's a good idea--all they needed was to have me and my personal profile as the admin representing the association! Not that there's anything raunchy on my profile or anything, but it's nothing I would feel comfortable sharing with 130,000 members, none of whom i've ever met. I think it's more about the fact that I don't have relationships with any of the members; if it were a smaller association where I interacted on a personal level with members, that would be different--actually, I am friends with one of the board members of my former association on my "real" profile.

At any rate, now that we have a page, it matters less, because no matter what I show up as ASHA when I post on our page (hate that!).

At this point, I'm wishing I just had the one in some cases--mostly because it's against FB policy to have 2 (I just learned this) and I don't like to be a rule-breaker. I guess if they shut down one of my profiles the decision will be made for me.

I will say that the professional one has one good purpose--I friended my daughter with it, so I can see what she's doing while she thinks I'm on Facebook purely for business ;)

[Deirdre Reid]

I know this has been a big topic on the ASAE forums. I'm behind on reading those so don't know what the consensus is, but I agree with you on this. At first I thought I would keep my Facebook strictly personal, and then a member friended me -- what to do, what to do. I ignored it a for a few days while mulling it over, and then decided that I am who I am, the same person personally and professionally, and I like this woman, so why not friend her, so I did. I believe that our lives may be getting more transparent as our social networks start to grow and perhaps merge, and maybe that's a good thing.