Mercury is moving into Cancer today and I am making a “Mercury in Cancer” decision. Mercury in Cancer is about communicating with family or about family. It’s a time when you might focus more on family history, legacies, communicating about family issues. Cancer is the crab… and it’s got a protective shell!
While mercury was retrograde in Cancer/Mercury last month, we may have gone into a review about such issues. Mercury is now direct and moving back into Cancer. We are now making family related communication decisions.
I certainly am! While Mercury was retrograde, I took myself off of Facebook. The reason was a Mercury/Cancer issue. I was having a hard time maintaining privacy and boundaries – my friends and family vs. business – me time vs. business time.
This is something that happens to you when you go into business for yourself. YOU become your brand. Yes your company might have a business name, but that is not the way that social media sees it. You create company pages to support your business and they link to your personal page. As I discovered…. delete your personal page and the company pages go too! So the idea of keeping your personal life and your business life separate becomes nonexistent. Business contacts start adding you to your personal profile. You start to need to make decisions about your personal profile… post for business or post for personal. But do you want to bombard your family and friends with that stuff?
Those who have been successful in the online business world have branded themselves. And their posts on their profile are business related. The reason is that Facebook algorithm limits the amount of views on business pages unless you pay to market. Which, okay they want to make money. But this pushes people in the direction of marketing on their personal profile which of course you don’t need to pay for.
Here is another problem… You business contacts want business. So business contacts start marketing hard to your friends… on your personal page. It’s happened twice that someone has wanted to market to one of my friends. They lost all sense of etiquette, bypassed approvals or introductions and just started marketing. Another tactic to marketing to your friends is by tagging you in a picture you’re not even in so it gets on your news feed. This might be okay for some… But I don’t even market to my friends and family. My friends and family are my friends and family and I would like to keep it that way.
Here’s a third problem. I had added someone (not a friend) and they decided to comment on my location. I’m always in the dark about how to limit privacy (because of the kajillion profile setting, options and changes to). I had a feature showing your location to others turned on. So he decided to make a comment.. Um.. I don’t know you… creepy for you to check and comment on my location. Do I care if my friends and family know where I am? No… If I need saving at least they can track me down… But someone I don’t know makes me uncomfortable.
The biggest problem was boundaries around my personal and private time. My Facebook feed turned from updates with friends and family into marketing from business contacts and Facebook ad purchasers. They are the ones with the big bucks paying to advertise. It also turned into a kajillion post from groups related to business. I became a part of the groups because of courses that I have been taking to “up my business game”. If I had problems with boundaries between business time and pleasure/personal time before, Facebook was making it impossible. My business was always on and so was I.
The first step was to delete my profile (but as you know, Facebook profiles live on forever, even if you delete them). I was off for an entire month. It felt amazing. I felt peaceful, more focused and safe. But I couldn’t connect with my business networks and a big part of being in business in networking. So came the next solution; a Facebook profile for business. It’s called Ingrid Insight (Ingrid Arboine) and you can follow or friend me up there. It’s a 9am-5pm profile. (Even if it looks like it’s not.. I’ve got hootsuite… So yup, I schedule some of those posts). I’ll still be sharing who I am and what I’m up to in my entire life … But let’s face it… Not everything…. And I will be posting about my business, or just liking/sharing the stuff I post on my pages.
Make sure to like me on my new profile…. there is a button in my footer!