Personal and professional balance on social media: An interview with Bethany Bell

Ryan Gipson
Jul 27, 2017 · 3 min read

The balance between being personal and professional on social media can often times be very difficult. Especially when your job entails you running social media accounts for your work business or brand. Bethany Bell, a 2016 standout graduate of the Drury SMS class, was kind enough to provide us with some advice and opinions on the subject.

Bethany is currently the events manager at the Downtown Springfield Association and a freelance social media strategist. Through her work, she supports a communication manager in managing and content creation for the Downtown Springfield Association social media brand. As a social media strategist, she runs the accounts for a well know coffee shop in town, The Coffee Ethic.

As do most people nowadays, Bethany also has multiple personal social media accounts of her own. Our interview with Bethany allowed us to ask for some insight on how to best balance being personal and professional on social media.

How do you separate your personal and professional social media accounts that you are running?

They are completely separate. When I create content for a client, I’m doing that in a very intentional way, usually a week to a month in advance. Since I am a coffee enthusiast, I am sometimes able to use my personal content for professional use. I try to limit that to images of just the product, no friends or faces.

When managing company accounts do you ever struggle with responding to your brand’s audience? Does it ever conflict with what your personal response would be?

I worked in the specialty coffee industry for 7 years as a barista, which taught me the tenets of good customer service. Responding on behalf of a brand on social is no different than being the person behind the bar greeting the customer face to face. You have to be courteous and hospitable without taking the jabs personal. While the customer is almost always right, I also believe it is important to not throw employees under the bus. It’s a delicate balance to strike, but it makes a world of difference. They work hard and have to know you have their back.

How do you balance remaining authentic to who you are on your personal social media and staying professional?

I treat each of my platforms differently. Twitter is where I look to network and stay on top of the news. I rarely share personal tidbits there. On Facebook, I let my guard down a little bit. I share the quirky things that make me smile in hopes to make others smile. On Instagram, I share my experiences visually. Many of my Instagram photos don’t make it to Facebook. Mostly because my mom and her friends don’t really care to see my artistic photo of lunch. I do have one rule: I opt to not post images of me enjoying alcohol, especially on Facebook. Not that there is anything wrong with it. It’s simply my choice on keeping some things separate.

What is the hardest part about maintaining a personal and professional balance on social media?

When I worked at an agency, I had a personal rule that I wouldn’t add clients on Facebook. If they sent me a request, it was hard to turn down, but I would immediately add them on LinkedIn to maintain boundaries and show I still wanted to stay connected.

If you could give a piece of advice to new professionals that will be working with both personal and professional social media accounts, what would it be?

Don’t mess with multiple accounts. As social media managers, we have enough accounts to create content for, there is no need to add extra work. We’re all human. No one expects a personal social media account to be perfect.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade