Social Networking at Grad School

[ANDS!]

Two FB profiles: one for Good friends, other for acquaintances. If you think that acquaintance is now ready to be moved to the good friends category go ahead. That's what I do. One FB for school relationships, other for the meat and potatoes folks.

[stell4]

I too am curious to hear more about how/if people are using LinkedIn as a tool. I've heard LinkedIn profiles have lead to a lot of identity theft, much more so than facebook since part of the idea of LinkedIn is to put your info out there to make business contacts.

[natsteel]

It's also important to remember how Facebook has changed over the years - what you posted several years ago, perhaps before you ever considered going to grad school or developing professional relationships, used to quite quickly get buried on your wall and become inaccessible; however, with the new timeline format, it's easy for newly added friends to quickly access that rant or those party photos from first year undergrad, for example.

FB now has an option to limit access to past posts. Check your Privacy Settings for the option.

Most of the discussion here has focused on the "social" part of "social networking." I, personally, am friends on FB with fellow grads, my UG mentors, and other historians in my field, as I am on Twitter. But I've also found great benefits in using social networking sites such as Twitter, Academia.edu, etc.... I would even include listservs and forums in there as well.

I've made connections on all those types of sites that have already resulted in some professional opportunities. There's no good reason not to have an Academia.edu page (which comes up very high in Google search results, as do LinkedIn pages). It gives you a free place to establish your professional identity online. In addition, I also have a Tumblr blog to which I don't make posts so it just acts as my own personal/professional website. Basically, I just want to make the point that as academics in this time and place we have greater possibilities and opportunities for networking than ever before and we should be taking advantage of them (because others sure are).