Twitter Tips: Safely Blend Personal and Professional

Like it or not, the emergence of social networks, the proliferation of mobile devices and the ubiquity of the Web has blurred our personal and professional lives. This has been particularly true on Twitter, the social networking service where users share short messages with one another.

Twitter holds inherent value for both your personal and business life. As a business person, building a presence on Twitter helps you connect with customers and peers, and perhaps get feedback on your products and services. For your personal life, Twitter can create what social media experts call an "ambient awareness" for the people important to you in your life - while each message might not be hugely significant, taken in total people can piece together you as a person or at least see the things you value.

But this inevitable blurring between the personal and professional life creates perils for Twitter users. Sharing a tweet (a message on Twitter) that has certain personal information could cause you to lose your "followers" (people who subscribe to your Twitter messages) or, worse, get you into trouble at work.

"If you want to use Twitter for both personal and business, then you have to be very wise about the type of information you are displaying," says Dan Schawbel ( @danschawbel), who authored the new book Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success. "Either way, your updates are all crawled by Google and can hurt your reputation if they negatively portray your brand."

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