Social Activities Blur Personal and Professional

Social media usage has soared not just among the general population but also among at-work Internet users, who are heading to the sites for both personal and professional reasons in greater numbers.

In recent survey FaceTime Communication showed social media and Web 2.0 applications have been adopted by 99% of end users to support business processes, even though 38% of IT professionals believe there is no social networking present on their networks.

Social networking use for business has grown exponentially. While 95% of users now use social networking for business reasons, 61% said they use public social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube every day, up from 51% in 2008. 15% use these sites “constantly throughout the day.” The use of tools such as Twitter for work purposes has risen almost sixfold in 12 months and now is used by 78% of end users.

In the proportion of at-work Web users worldwide logging on to each network studied. LinkedIn was the top site for professional social networking in 2009, followed by Twitter, which was used by more than three-quarters of respondents for work reasons, according to eMarketer

The top reasons users gave for using social sites at work were professional networking with colleagues (79%), learning about colleagues (66%), and general research (61%). A comparatively low 37% were logging on to social sites for the more specialized function of marketing to customers.

In regarding at-work social networking. Nearly three-quarters of US Internet users said it was unacceptable to check Facebook unrelated to work, though FaceTime found more than nine in 10 respondents doing so.

It is the fact that social networking can be a great way to connect, share, network, and pass the time in dull meetings and classes, but just how appropriate is it to share everything online? Beside it can create complications when it comes to friending colleagues and supervisors, another issue raised by such sites, which blur boundaries because of their usefulness both at home and on the job.

In regarding to how safe and how secure those social media sites are, so far as I know, the GoSecure is the only one that offer their users with free access to their own private secured social media portal.

Finally, technology changes fast, social media changes rapidly and it’s hard to keep up. If your customers aren’t already there, there’s no reason for you to be there too, so you don’t have to worry about that much. Instead, just commit to one or two social-media sites and work on creating regular content. Readers, viewers and search engines will better recognize your brand if you’re consistent.