Twitter - Public or Private?

Lately I am getting more and more people following me on Twitter, who, I discover when looking to see who they are, have protected their page. We cannot follow you back without more work on our part: asking your permission to let us in. While I am flattered to be followed, this controlling one’s privacy brought to mind a recent business discussion as to why people keep their social networking connections private.

In that conversation, most people in the room favored public access. Everyone agreed that getting the most contacts is not conducive to good business -- or even to selling a product or service. It is certainly less tedious to be able to directly ask someone to network than to ask me to connect you -- and the back and forth that should entail if you are practicing good business networking habits.

If you do ask me for a connection, I do take the time to see who you are, what you do, and whether my making a connection that may get a negative response from the person I am connecting. I would not want to forward a bogus or "just collecting names" request. I would usually take the time to ask the 3rd party if they would like to make the connection. All this does take time. Sometimes it is worth it. Sometimes, as recently happened to me, the requestor had the wrong person. I did not forward the request.

And I do spend a lot more time looking at a connection request when lists are private. You can tell if you have opted for public or private by looking at your preferences.

I suspect most of us don't take a second look at our preferences once we get past the initial setup. This is not, imo, a good practice. Updating your personal information on your social sites at least yearly makes you a more valuable business contact. It has the added advantage, especially to those of us early adapters or those who are a bit timid about all that the socnet age has to offer, of allowing you to correct what may have been an unintentional consequence. You may not have understood what public and private meant when first registering, or you may want to be public, now that you’ve become comfortable with the Internet and the 21st century way of talking.

Posted from Broadside: Taking Aim at the Social Revolution