You use Facebook primarily for sharing the lighter moments on your life with family members and close friends but what do you do when an office colleague (or even your boss) sends you a friends request on Facebook?
Richard Baum from Reuters shares some tips on how you can ignore or decline Facebook friends request from people with whom you are not very familiar or don’t feel like sharing your personal life with them.
Of course, many people don’t have a problem with being Facebook friends with colleagues, especially those they know well. But for those who would rather keep their work and private lives separate, there are options other than ignoring an unwanted friend request.
One is to accept the invitation and then use Facebook’s privacy settings to limit the flow of information between you and your new “friend.” To do this, you can create a “colleagues” list from the Friends menu and then add to it your new friend. Then navigate to the privacy settings and use the “Profile Information” section to control what information people on the “colleagues” list can see.
An alternative, says workplace etiquette expert Barbara Pachter, is to suggest to the colleague that you connect instead on LinkedIn, a social network for professional relationships. link.