I was updating an older post on how to end an internship, and came across some old advice I’d given on not asking superiors you barely knew to “LinkIn” with you because that was tantamount to a referral. We also had a ton of posts back in the day about what to do if your boss sends you a friend request on Facebook. We haven’t talked about either in a long time, so let’s discuss!

Here are the questions:

• How are you using LinkedIn (if at all)?
• How are you using Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok (if at all)?
• Do you have rules about which coworkers you’ll “friend” or link in?
• (In life, do you have rules about who you’ll friend or link with?)

For my own $.02:

I primarily use LinkedIn for professional contacts; I’ll also link with good friends on LinkedIn. I think it’s a lot less “tantamount to a referral” than it was a zillion years ago, just, to me, I like to keep LinkedIn in that professional zone. I don’t push content to LinkedIn, nor do I share any thoughts on LinkedIn in that public space. I don’t even check the public space for people to share thoughts — I kind of use LinkedIn like I use Home Depot, I only go in if I need something, and I don’t browse once I get there.

I still use Facebook, and Insta, and TikTok, but I use them in different ways.

For Facebook, I have my privacy settings set so that only real friends can see my posts — accordingly, I’m not overly protective over who I befriend on Facebook, and I’m friends with a ton of neighbors and parents I know through kid-related things. (I also don’t post a ton, to be honest!) The biggest value I get out of Facebook is the various special interest groups I’m in, whether it’s for my neighborhood, kid-related issues, or blogging issues. I tend to use the groups as a really specialized Google — if I’m looking for something very specific, I’ll check there first. (For example, there was recently a big switch for Google Analytics, and when I was searching for info on GA4 I went directly to the various blogging groups I’m in on Facebook.)

(For work, I do push content to the Corporette and CorporetteMoms Facebook pages, and pay a fair amount for third party services… our reach is super minimal unless I boost a post, though, so I really only do the bare minimum there. They recently changed the settings so that I can’t share a fun meme post with either the Corporette or C-Moms Pages without changing my login info and so forth, which ends up being a huge pain.)

I use Instagram both personally and professionally. Professionally, I push content there very rarely, although I’m trying to be better about it. On my personal account, I follow a lot of food bloggers, exercise bloggers, and a few style/shopping/decorating content creators. The “perfect curated Instagram” idea has always kind of bugged me, though, so I don’t use it very often — maybe a few times a week I’ll look at my feed. My real life friends are largely absent from Instagram, though — for a while I followed a neighbor who was posting outfits and it felt truly weird, so I unfollowed her.

TikTok I use almost entirely personally, although I do have an account for Corporette there, and am saving a few things that I might share in that capacity at a later date. (We’ll see.) I vastly prefer the way that TikTok is messy and real compared to Instagram — yes, even with the filters, which truly are insane if you haven’t looked at them. But everything feels off the cuff and easy. Kate and I send each other things via TikTok, but the majority of my other friends aren’t there. Again I see TikTok as a specialized search engine – if I want to know something quickly I can usually find fifteen different brief clips talking about that very thing; it’s a very fast way to learn. (I never got into YouTube much, but vastly prefer the brief TikTok length to the interminably long YouTube videos.) I follow a zillion people there, including people talking about fashion, design, diet, cooking, exercise, gardening, books, and more. There is very little overlap between who I follow on Tiktok and who I follow on Instagram, for some reason.

I use LTK as a counterpart to TikTok — if there’s someone whose style I like on TikTok it’s a pain and a half to click the link to go to her LinkTree or whatnot; instead I’ll just go to the LTK app and see immediate product links to everything she’s posted. I don’t use LTK hardly at all professionally, although I ought to get into it more!

Readers, how about you — how are you using LinkedIn these days, and who are you linking in with? How about Facebook, if you’re still using it?

(Full disclosure: I still own a bit of stock in Facebook, and previously owned stock in LinkedIn. For more details see here.)

Stock photo via Stencil.