Social Media - Work or Pleasure

Last week we noticed a new kid on the block for Social Media and apps. This new app is called BranchOut and is connected to Facebook, which now boasts more than 25 million registered users.   The concept is that BranchOut allows users of Facebook to leverage their Facebook friends to find jobs, recruit talent and strengthen professional contacts.

But then isn’t that what LinkedIn is for, so you can use your contacts to find a new job, recruit talent and strengthen your professional contacts? LinkedIn, in case you’ve missed out started as the social media site used when looking for a job.  It started in 2003 and now has 2 new members per second and 150 million members. LinkedIn has now become a key search engine when trying to find out about companies and specifically their employees.

A quick search on Google revealed over 345 different social media network sites with more appearing every week.  Some of those admittedly are aimed at specific groups, such as Asian Avenue, which caters for the Asian American community, but there are plenty of other sites that do very much the same as the main contenders we all hear on a more regular basis Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and Google+.

So where should the line be drawn between business and leisure?  With more online activity, the two areas seem to have blurred over the last few years.  Will those who have Facebook accounts and post picture of their weekend ‘antics’ on the site need to tidy up their act if they then start job hunting and link into BranchOut.  Will we have more ‘gossip’ appearing on LinkedIn.  There have already been some well publicised cases where employers have searched employees on Facebook and have not been overly impressed with what they have found. At least for now on LinkedIn you don’t know what party your contacts have attended recently!

Twitter however does appear to have successfully straddled the areas of business and leisure.  Perhaps because the information or Tweets are just 140 characters long and there is no chance to get into too much detail.  It works on both platforms.

With this huge pool of information we need to be careful about how much benefit we are really getting from the sites. Which are best to use? How much information do you want to reveal about yourself? Or what you want others to know about you. 

We just can’t guess where social media will go in the next few years, for now it seems to dominate new feeds and information feeds.   Who can tell, but it’s something to keep a watchful eye on and make sure you know where the line is between your business contacts and your leisure time friends.

Now where did I put my note pad and paper……………………………

We would love to hear your comments on BranchOut and how you view social media in general?

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