Social Media Pages: Personal Vs. Company

You’ve probably  heard the saying,“don’t mix business with pleasure” or the other one, “it’s nothing personal, it’s just business”. Both of them infer to the business side being separate from the personal side and for a good reason too. You would be better off following the advice above as what you communicate on social media platforms, be it personal or professional will have different effects at various contacts according to how you are acquainted with them. However, as there still are a couple of advantages one can accrue with a combined social media presence, let us discuss them both at length.

 Personal Vs. Company; Which is Better?

1.Separating Social Media Accounts Allows you to be open without fear of offending a professional contact

Social media allows more freedom to associate, air views and give likes and dislikes. Yes, it is your personal space, and you can do with it whatever you please. But when your company is involved, you have to be more guarded. Your stakeholders – workers, clients, partners, and suppliers – all expect a more formal and professional demeanor.

With separate accounts, however, you can be as open and frank as you wish on your personal social media page while still keeping it professional with your company page. After all, you would not want your employees to know that you hate Mondays as much as they do, would you?

2. Maintaining different accounts takes time 

The time you will have to commit to two different social media accounts is significant especially when you consider that most businesses have profiles on multiple social media platforms. The secondary accounts just ensure you have double the workload and it can be off-putting. It is for this reason that most individuals are reluctant to separate their personal and business accounts on social media.

3. Having personal and company pages will split your targeted audience

The primary motive for businesses to be active on social media is to build up traffic and generate leads for your business. To do this, you need to leverage on your contacts to expand your reach within the demographic you are targeting. More often than not, personal friends have generated business leads for you by sharing your content with their friends and personally recommend you to them. With two accounts, generating leads and traffic this way becomes harder as you will be slashing half of your audience and preceding the opportunity of sharing with your acquaintances.

4. Low Engagement with Follower Base on Company Pages

Once you create a company page on LinkedIn, you start to realize just how limited you are in terms of engaging with followers. You cannot invite followers neither can you upload videos. Facebook pages are also limiting to some extent but you can always trust the internet to find hacks around this challenge.

5. Personal Pages Hamper Consistency in Branding

Unlike your personal page where you can post any epiphanies that pop-up in your head, your company page is different. Most importantly, your brand voice and message needs to be clear and consistent, achieving this with a merged account might pose some challenges, especially for your followers who will be getting mixed messages of your personal photos on vacation and your product offers.

6. You Might Get Penalized

Did you know that it goes against LinkedIn’s User Agreement to have two different LinkedIn accounts? If you are guilty, keep in mind that they will find out eventually and they will make you choose the page the works best for you-personal or company, and stick with it.

The Compromise

Is there a compromise to this argument? In my opinion, there is one to be made as there are different social media platforms, with different advantages and levels of effectiveness for both the personal and business purposes.

You should analyze all your available options and find out what works best for you for both professional and personal use. For instance, LinkedIn and YouTube lean more towards professionalism, while Snapchat and Twitter seem more favorable for personal use.

Facebook and Pinterest are best for informal interactions (yes, some people will disagree here). The trick with all these platforms is to get a matrix comprised of different platforms for different purposes, different messages and different audience according to your needs.

Did you find this read helpful? Let us know in the comment section below 🙂