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So you're a professional, right?
Perhaps you're a CEO, CTO, product manager or co-founder of a startup?
Maybe you're a senior developer and you volunteer on weekends teaching disadvantaged kids how to code?
Maybe you're a stockbroker; an accountant? An angel investor on weekends?
You've been in the trenches. People come to you for advice, and you give it. Good, solid advice.
Advice people could make some money on, if they'd just pay attention. Advice people could take to heart. Maybe change someone's life for the better.
You should be sharing your thoughts to the world on Facebook.
Sure, some people will tell you LinkedIn is the place where professionals share information.
Twitter is better suited, others will say. Perhaps they are right - only time will tell for sure.
But every time I post anything on LinkedIn, my inbox fills up with recruiting emails.
And my Twitter feed feels like the olden days on the trading floor - with a thousand people screaming for your attention using 3-5 words and a hand wave, pointing to a link out to somewhere.
Facebook, meanwhile, has also been quietly building up the infrastructure necessary to accommodate professional sharing.
Followers and Privacy Settings
The typical argument against using Facebook professionally is always "Facebook is for keeping in touch with my friends and family. I don't need my business associates seeing the pictures I post of my kids playing in the pool."
Well, yes. That's 100% true. However, this is easily managed by adjusting your privacy settings for each post. You select *Public* for professional posts and *Friends* for family posts.
Let me say that again: Your Facebook Privacy Settings should be *Public* for professional posts and *Friends* for family posts.
Then you adjust your Followers settings to allow people to "Follow" your public posts.
Your Followers will never see your Friends posts, only your Public posts.
Your life is once again neatly compartmentalized AND you get to slowly but surely built up your professional credentials by giving solid advice to people you do not personally know, but who are honestly interested in your opinion.
That's it. Simple but extremely powerful once you have figured it out.
Of course I'm not the only one who has figured this out.
The majority of professionals and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, San Francisco and New York have already been doing this for months or years.
People like Dave McClure already have tens of thousands of followers on Facebook.
The rest of the world is slowly following (pun intended).
Sadly, Chicago seems a bit behind the times here as well.
Only a small handful of the Chicago Techweek100 have opted to enable Followers.
In fact, seeing that is what prompted me to write this post in the first place.
I had been attempting to add them to my Facebook Chicago Entrepreneurs and Startups Interest List, but I don't add people who don't have Followers turned on (I'm not interested in pictures of their kids playing in the pool, just their professional advice).
So their thoughts and advice (although I'm sure it is worthy, especially since they were selected as "Chicago area leaders who have a significant impact on business and technology") will sadly go unread by thousands of potential Followers.
P.S. Interest Lists are another great professional feature on Facebook.
They help nicely categorize different groups, and they are shareable so you can benefit from others' work.
My next post will review how you can set them up and manage them efficiently.
