I’ve been thinking a lot about how my professional and personal lives overlap, especially in relation to my online activity. As a writer, who blogs about my own writing, there are bound to be personal details that come up (for instance, I’m due to give birth pretty soon – you can bet that will influence my posts to some degree), but for the most part I try to keep it professional.
For me, that means not writing about my family or friends (except insofar as they influence my life as a writer). The question is, how should I use sites like Twitter and Facebook to promote my writing, without telling the world every detail of my personal life? Twitter is pretty easy – I really only use that for work/writing related ideas, but Facebook is another story.
The solution I’ve come up with is to create an additional Facebook page for my “business” of writing. The new “April Dávila – Writer” page is very low on privacy – everything on it is intended for the public. Right after I created it, I increased the privacy settings on my personal “April Dávila” page so that only friends can see the embarrassing photos of me drunk in Vegas. This isn’t to say I won’t share photos on my new “professional” page, but this way I have a little more control over who sees what.
The hard part is that now I don’t want to use my personal page to promote things like my blog, or articles that are published, but only a handful of my friends have signed up for my professional page where I intend to post about my writing. How to I get my old friends to sign up for the new page? Does it even matter? Every time I think I have all this online self-promotion business worked out I realize I’m just a babe in the woods.
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