Public social networks like Facebook & linkedin are everywhere right now in the workplace.  The average Smartphone user checks Facebook 14 times a day. On average these were 18-44 year olds and the only thing they did more often was text. Twitter is very popular, with 500 million tweets a day being sent out in October 2012 according to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.

Whilst many people admit to logging in on these networks throughout the day whilst at work, most people wouldn’t want to have their boss on Facebook and they certainly wouldn’t want their boss posting on to their wall about anything work related. Posting to someone congratulating them on their promotion wouldn’t be appropriate for a user who doesn’t want their friends knowing their financial situation for example.

The most popular work related public social network is LinkedIn. It is 10 years old and has 200 million users worldwide, and according to visual.ly, over 10 million endorsements are given daily. When on the LinkedIn page, the site prompts you to endorse contacts for skills they have listed and in turn they often choose to endorse people in return. You can also use the site to write recommendations about people you have worked with, allowing them to build a kind of online CV. This feature could be used by employers, allowing them to write a recommendation for a top performing employee, or they could endorse them for new skills they have developed. With 2 new members joining every second and 81% of users belonging to at least one group, this is a very popular platform to meet and link up with people in your industry and a great place to reward and endorse employees to showcase them at their best.

Below are some do’s and don’ts on how to make social network channels work to your advantage:

Do:

• Endorse your colleagues
• Recommend people you work with
• Use LinkedIn to announce major milestones such as employee of the year/ month and success milestones
• Use Facebook fan pages or twitter pages to thank customers for their feedback
• Do train customer care staff posting public answers must be properly trained with clearly delineated authority
• Use twitter for trade public level announcements

Don’t:

• Don’t use LinkedIn for minor elements of recognition
• Don’t use LinkedIn for anything you wouldn’t want to be made public
• Don’t treat Twitter like a chat by the water cooler. Don’t post anything onto twitter you wouldn’t want published about yourself on the front page of a newspaper. Once it is said, it won’t go away.
• Don’t use Facebook for employee recognition at all – it’s too personal a forum
• Don’t post anything to LinkedIn for anything that could be useful for competitors
• Don’t put anything personally confidential on twitter than a competitor would find helpful or would benefit their business.