Facebook friending my company?

November 5, 2010 10:04 AM

How to friend my company on facebook, yet keep my private posts private?

My company has only a few people in the home office. My boss and most of my co-workers work from their homes, remotely, and we have never met face to face. So the company thought it would be a good idea for us to all become friends on Facebook so we could put faces with names, learn more about each other, etc. From a certain perspective it makes sense.

But I don't want my boss to know about my private life! I would love to hear about how people have compartmentalized their Facebook account so that they can follow their company FB posts without leaking out private posts that you only want to share with family and friends.

I have already locked down my account so that very little info about me is available unless you are my friend. But how do I "friend" my company without risk? And what if I use a tool like the FB application on my Droid - won't that post an "open" post that everyone at my company will see?

posted by jcdill to Computers & Internet (21 answers total)

If the company has a profile that's a personal account this could be an issue. I suggest a Fan Page. That way there's a common place to congregate and post photos and messages, but no one in the group has access to anything but your profile picture unless you designate otherwise.
posted by inturnaround at 10:10 AM on November 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

Create a group to put your company in and then in your privacy options, customize it so that group can only see the bare minimum on your profile.
posted by JaredSeth at 10:11 AM on November 5, 2010 [3 favorites]

I use privacy filters on pretty much every single status update I make as I've got a mix of family, friends, old teachers and old church ministers among my FB friends. When you make a post, click that little lock icon and change it to "customize," then choose the people you do or do not want to see that post. This won't help you with older updates unless you set your default privacy filter to some specific list that doesn't include your company, but then they might notice their lack of access.
posted by katillathehun at 10:11 AM on November 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

If you need further details on how to do this, just say the word and I'll walk through it myself to document the steps.
posted by JaredSeth at 10:11 AM on November 5, 2010

Privacy settings. Go to them! Block bosses, coworkers, overly religious Southern cousins, people from HS that seem to be collecting friends in some weird quest for SO MANY FB FRIENDS!!11!, annoying neighbors, aunts who don't know how to unlock caps lock, uncles who send hate Obama... You can block them from seeing your shit and also not see their shit. It's like they exist in a black hole.

We're all doing it.
posted by jerseygirl at 10:11 AM on November 5, 2010 [3 favorites]

Register another Facebook account with the same name. Keep your accounts separate and voila.

You see Mr Anderson... It appears you've been living two lives...
posted by Biru at 10:11 AM on November 5, 2010

I spent a year trying to figure out what to do about the issue and finally settled on creating two entirely separate Facebook identities.... a family & friends one and a public one. Though I deleted the former as I started getting cold feet about being sucked into the whole FB thing... for me, e-mail was perfectly fine all along.
posted by crapmatic at 10:12 AM on November 5, 2010

I have about five different lists set up, each with their own security settings. Family and real friends go in one place, work people in another, casual or online acquaintances in another, old classmates who are not friends in another, and so on.
posted by cmgonzalez at 10:13 AM on November 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

I don't recommend two facebook pages. It's really obvious to everyone that only sees your "work" facebook page that it's JUST a work-friend page. Plus, with the "People you may know!" feature, when your coworkers view your "work" profile, Facebook might helpfully suggest that they know your "friend" profile.

Just tinker with the privacy settings until you feel comfortable.
posted by samthemander at 10:16 AM on November 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

So the company thought it would be a good idea for us to all become friends on Facebook so we could put faces with names, learn more about each other, etc Makes sense that it's crazy. They want to know if your'e bashing the place on the side. At least that's what our strategy is at our place (to the point where someone in a satellite office got canned because one of the workers tattled on them by showing the head of HR).

I second the 2nd profile and keep it boring. Only friend the work people and don't allow private life to mingle. I wouldn't trust FB's security settings to mingle your personal one.
posted by stormpooper at 10:25 AM on November 5, 2010

I stay family-friendly on Facebook and use a Twitter account to swear and snark. A bit daft given that the Twitter is the public one, but it is one solution, to 'compartmentalise' via two mediums.
posted by kmennie at 10:28 AM on November 5, 2010

Creating a second account is actually a violation of the TOS. Not that they're likely to notice, but it is grounds to delete your account if they want to.
posted by NoraReed at 10:30 AM on November 5, 2010

Am I the only one that won't post anything online unless I'm okay with the whole world seeing it?

With every privacy feature, there's always a way around it - the fact that someone else is seeing it and could repost it, retweet it, etc. And then there's Google.

Just my two cents.
posted by razorfrog at 10:37 AM on November 5, 2010 [4 favorites]

Creating a second account doesn't work, anyway. My original account doesn't have my real name on it anywhere, but somehow facebook knows. Upon creating my work account, it immediately recommended my work page to most of my personal-account friends, and vice versa.
posted by vorfeed at 10:38 AM on November 5, 2010

Is use of FB for this absolutely set in stone at this point, or would there be the possibility of influencing them to use something else? If the latter, you might suggest that LinkedIn is more appropriate than FB for professional contacts.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 11:03 AM on November 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Add all your coworkers to a group called Work.

In Account > Privacy settings >Customize settings (screenshots here), click in the button on the right of every content type. There, add Work in the "Hide this from" field.

I recommend hiding Posts by me, Photos and videos I'm tagged in, and Can see Wall posts by friends at least. When you hide Posts by me, this will be the default setting for any new posts you make. You can still create wall posts visible to your coworkers, by modifying the privacy settings in that particular post.
posted by clearlydemon at 11:52 AM on November 5, 2010 [2 favorites]

Best answer: There, add Work in the "Hide this from" field.

I actually prefer whitelisting to blacklisting. E.g., make a list called "NotWork" for all your friends who aren't work friends (I actually have friends segregated into about a dozen lists, but the idea is the same) and on the things you want to hide in the Privacy Settings, choose "Make This Visible To: These People: Specific People" and type in NotWork.

Why? Because then, when you're adding a new friend (who may be a work friend), if you forget to add them to any list at all, they see the minimum instead of the maximum.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 12:57 PM on November 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

Am I the only one that won't post anything online unless I'm okay with the whole world seeing it?

I'm not sure this is necessarily the most viable way, with the increasing relevance of our social media to our 'real' lives. I wouldn't want my bosses to see me getting pleasantly drunk with friends, but that doesn't mean I don't do it; I take reasonable precautions to ensure my privacy and hope for the best.
posted by threeants at 3:15 PM on November 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

I just realized I wasn't clear-- I meant the last comment with regard to 'real life' sightings, not Facebook documentation.
posted by threeants at 3:16 PM on November 5, 2010

One tricky thing I ran into is that when my birthday rolled around, the work people I blocked couldn't post birthday greetings on my wall, which they definitely noticed.
posted by smackfu at 7:03 AM on November 8, 2010

Response by poster: razorfrog, your point is good, but it's not the issue here. I don't post anything to FB that I wouldn't want the whole world to know, but at the same time I do post things I don't want to directly share with everyone I work with. Work is work, friends are friends. I want to share with friends things that I wouldn't share at work (e.g. over the water cooler), but these aren't things that I'm embarrassed about or that would have consequences for my job, it's just *personal* stuff I don't want to share with *work*.
posted by jcdill at 10:16 AM on November 13, 2010