A great number of people have (rightfully) said (in my opinion) that personal Facebook profiles should not be used for professional purposes. That’s why so many people have leveraged Linked in for their working lives. Both social networks are widely known, and have very different sets of tools that will help different purposes. However, there is little that Linked in can diversify on outside the professional realm; which makes it a highly specialized tool.
Facebook on the other hand, is mostly used for entertainment and personal social life. However, it is also the largest international database that holds the likes and dislikes, behavior, and demographic information that any company in the world would die for. So, of course fan pages had to be born. This however, is a consumer directed approach, companies stepping in to sell their product or service in a more socially friendly environment. This is very different from a consumer, or in this case, an individual to use their Facebook profile as their professional résumé.
It’s been said that companies do a background check on potential employees before hiring them. That includes Facebook, Twitter and of course Linked in. A very large number of people have sweat in the past because of their personal profiles on Facebook. Not because they’ve done something wrong, but because it is the place in which people just are who they are informally. Of course security enhancements have been brought to the network in which users can raise their level of privacy and block people whom they are not friends with.
This brings me to the new professional app & tool on Facebook: Branch Out. Of course, as any other app on Facebook, the user must allow it to use Facebook data in order to function. This would be like melting Linked in & Facebook together. All privacy settings that you may have, only work for external people (or existing contacts) not to see certain information. By allowing the app to connect to your personal profile, you are disabling these settings for the app to run properly (just in the app, the settings will continue to be how they are for the rest of the contacts in your list).
To be clear, this is my predisposed opinion of the app. However, many of my contacts have begun using the app. I would like to wait out and see just how effective it really is. I’m sure it will guarantee jobs to many of its users, but will it be better than Linked in? Will it have repercussions? We’ll see what the crowd’s wisdom says after a while of using it.