Setting Up A Professional Network Via Facebook

What comes to your mind when the words professional networking comes up? My guess is that it’s LinkedIn. When I was first asked about this, my guess was as good as yours. But then again, I was told that Facebook can also be used for professional networking.

Upon further digging, I found that Facebook is indeed very much usable for networking on a professional level. For one thing, the sheer mass of Facebook users outnumbers that of LinkedIn’s. And although Facebook isn’t really meant for professional networking, opportunities to establish such a connection with other individuals would be quite stupid to pass up on.

Separate personal from professional

Thanks to Facebook’s list functions; you can create a separate group for friends, family, and colleagues easily. Once you’ve finished segregating business and personal contacts, you can set the privacy settings to control which parts of your profile your family, friends, and colleagues can access.

Join Facebook groups

Facebook’s group function allows people to connect with each other based on any given common interest. By participating in groups that cover your niche or specialty, you up your chances of meeting like-minded people who you can add to your professional network list.

Once you belong to a specific niche group, you can start skimming for recent news to keep you in tune with industry updates, member listings to find people who you might want to connect with or talk to, discussion boards where you can participate and share your ideas, or wall posts where you can introduce yourself or get to know people who are new in the group.

Don’t be afraid to participate

Adding your own thing to the mix will help show people what you’ve got. Start off with a witty introduction of yourself to the group, then work your way into sharing links. Eventually, you’d want to throw in unique ideas or questions for people in the group to participate in yourself.

Once you’re able to find people who interest you or you would want to connect to, don’t be shy and add them. If you’ve been visible enough because of your effort to participate, then it wouldn’t be hard to get people to add you back. Nothing builds trust well than always being out in the open and sharing what you know.

If you think about it, professional networking online is similar to how you’d do it in real life. You join a group and participate enough to pick out people who you’d like to connect with. Once you’ve established a mutually beneficial relationship with other professionals, you can start venturing into other things.

How about you? Where do you get your professional network from?

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