Networking and Facebook

[Petyo]

Networking is a big part of our industry and Facebook is the current trend, so I wanted to start a discussion on that. Mainly, I wonder whether it's better to use a personal page and add friends, or set up a professional fan page where you must make them like it in order to "add" them. I see a lot of professionals use their personal page and many have already reached 5000 friends. I am kind of reluctant to start using mine that way, because I may distance my real friends if all I post is art related and there are total strangers liking and commenting on it. What I don't like about fan pages is that you can't like and comment on people's posts unless they are on your page. So joining groups like Team awesome is not possible as a fan page. You can't also get bigger audience, unless they decide to like your page. As a normal user you can add friends and be the active one. I know you can set the visibility of each post so that only certain people can see it, but I'm still not sure if I want that many people on my personal page.

So I'd like to ask people who have a fan page or personal page with a bigger number of friends (only 87 on mine) or likes: how is it? Is it manageable? If you use your personal page how are your art unrelated friends reacting? Are you allowed to have a personal life anymore?

In short, I'm wondering what's the best course of action. I find a personal page to be much more versatile, because we are individuals and not corporations and the fan pages seem to be tailored with that in mind. I would create a separate personal page for my art, but if FB detects that we are the same person (and they will) I will be forced to delete it.

What are your thoughts on that?

[SpectreX]

I have a lot of friends on my private FB (don't have an art one) and it's already difficult to see everything that passes.

I've seen this discussion before somewhere and one person made a response that I found was the better one:
Do both, post your art on your private one and on your fan page. This way you can keep your art close to your friends and discuss in private.
And you'll have the page in which strangers can like and comment.

This is purely my opinion though that this sounds the best. And I have no art yet on my FB (still just doing studies) so I can't say for sure.

[Rognoll]

Why not both? Likeable pages take a lot less time, and you can comment with your own account.