It’s surprising how much conversations around social media have shifted over the last three years. There used to be a tacit understanding that LinkedIn was for professional posts only, deal announcements, partner moves, conferences, market commentary and the like, while Facebook (and Twitter, if you really must) was for everything else. Hilarious memes and posts about your children/pet/culinary experiment/exercise humblebrag had no place on a professional networking platform.
That all changed dramatically with the onset of Covid and nothing to do but use social media as the main means of communicating with the outside world. One contact, who is rather more Gen X than Millennial, bemoaned an internal memo instructing people to show more of a human side in the curation of their Zoom backgrounds and on LinkedIn. Wasn’t this a bit awkward? Do I really want my clients knowing (horror of horrors) the ins and outs of my domestic life? It was a particularly British quandary, a cultural aversion to oversharing; the online equivalent of maintaining a professional stiff upper lip. Continue reading “Oversharing? Navigating social media can be fraught but there is much to admire”