Pausing for a moment before posting to social media is sound advice for everyone.  After all, there’s no shortage of unadvisable celebrity tweets that quickly get deleted after a very negative public reaction. So the obvious suggestions, like avoid mixing alcohol and social media, apply.  But digital marketers that are responsible for business communications have another layer of screening they need to be aware of – intermixing business and leisure.

Social media platforms are doing a much better job of integrating business profiles/pages into individual accounts so that a person can administer both from one location.  However, that convenience comes with a price. It’s gotten much easier to post your personal message as if it’s coming from the business.

This lesson was somewhat harmlessly driven home for me when a friend posted a message to Facebook about the restaurant we were at, waited a few moments, and then said, “Shoot, I think I just posted my review to the company Facebook page.” Thankfully she was immediately aware of what she had done, the content wasn’t distasteful, and she removed the post before it became a problem.

Posting to the wrong account can be way more damaging than this based on what the post contains and how long it is live on an account.

So how should a digital marketer handle separating business from leisure? Here’s a few specific tactics.

Don’t post leisure or personal content to Social Media.

More than once I’ve heard it said that the best social media marketers are people that post little or nothing personally.  That’s often said because they don’t tend to get distracted by the sheer volume of content on the platform and instead focus on executing their marketing strategy.  However, it does have a side benefit here.  Digital marketers that don’t use the platform socially eliminate the risk of accidentally posting leisure content to their business profile

Always finish a social media session in your personal profile.

It’s easy to leave your business profile loaded on your phone or device, forget which profile is active when you load it again, and haphazardly publish something to the business profile by mistake.  Getting in the habit of always ending a session on your personal profile insures that the worst case scenario is a business message landing on the personal profile which is almost always easier to clear up. It’s worth noting that business messages on a personal profile still need to be corrected as it’s possible the marketer that posted it is not a qualified representative of the company to deliver the content.

Only publish business posts via a social media content app.

Social media publishing apps allows for digital marketers to set aside a period of time to create their content and pre-schedule them according to their publishing calendar. That largely eliminates the need for the use of a phone or device for direct business posts where spontaneity can often lead to errors.

The answer to avoiding a toxic mixture of leisure and business in social media really comes down to diligently reviewing anything before posting. Set some safeguards in place so that content your social network would enjoy doesn’t get shared to your business community who might find it unsuitable.