Social Networking is growing bigger and more popular than ever these days. Social networking takes many different forms and serves many different purposes. In my previous article I discussed two of the three major benefits of social networking to the telecommuter – those being to educate/inform on topics relevant to the telecommuter, and to help the telecommuter keep track of and even grow his/her social network. This, of course, can be a key tool for the telecommuter who can too easily be cut off from co-workers and miss opportunities to meet new people and build new relationships.

In this article I will discuss details on what I believe is the most important benefit of social networking for the telecommuter…

Maintaining visibility within your social network

As a telecommuter, staying top-of-mind with your co-workers, manager, and staff is a big challenge and doing it successfully is a critically important measure of success in your telecommuting career.

As I mentioned in my previous article, FaceBook can be used to provide updates about the day-to-day aspects of your life and allow your friends to easily check-up on you and keep up-to-date on your activities. The really nice part of this is if you are “friends” with someone who lives far away (or who you don’t see face-to-face in the office because you telecommute), through postings you can still remain top-of-mind for each other and maintain a really strong connection.

Like FaceBook, Twitter is another tool that allows you to provide updates to those who “follow you” via “tweets”. Tweets are short simple messages, similar in style and length to text messages, that are broadcast to everyone who chooses to follow you. Twitter is another tool that allows you to briefly pop into the thoughts and focus of those who follow you, even though they may rarely or never see you face-to-face.

However, while FaceBook and Twitter offer advantages to the telecommuter in helping maintain visibility to their coworkers, there are some drawbacks, or at least cautions, you must consider.

Both these tools frequently have a personal, non-work-related focus. People often post or tweet about details of their lives such as what they did with their family that weekend, their favorite new book their reading, and, for some who take it to an extreme, what they just had for breakfast that morning. They also often use it to complain about some aspects of their lives – work being near the top of the list!

If you do choose to encourage co-workers to “friend” or “follow” you via these tools, consider carefully what you post. Frequent posting/tweeting can become annoying for your co-workers, especially if you post during company time while people are trying to work. Not only is it a distraction to your co-workers, it’s also a clear indication to them that you’re not hunkered down working from home but are instead “goofing around” on FaceBook or Twitter. You may find that too much of this behavior leads to your telecommuting privileges, or worse yet - your job, being revoked so fast that your head will spin!

This is not to imply that these tools are all bad. Used properly, these types of tools really can help you maintain relationships with your work contacts you don’t get to see every day in the office. Think outside the box. These tools aren’t just for posting about your personal life. You can use them to share interesting information that you find online related to your industry or area of expertise. Twitter, has a nice feature where you can “re-tweet” interesting information that you’ve received that you think your followers would like to see. Sticking to professional topics to tweet or post about will cast you as a great source amongst your coworkers of useful/valuable industry-relevant information. Now if that’s not a perfect way to remain top-of-mind with people you don’t see very frequently I don’t know what is!

So talk to your co-workers before you connect with them via these types of tools and see if they agree to it. And if you do have a lot of your work contacts connected via these tools, think about what you post or tweet. If you forget that your manager is connected to you and you start posting/tweeting about how you’re getting bored with your job and plan to start looking around for something new, you may suddenly find yourself with all the free time in the world to job hunt!

Technorati Tags: telecommute careers, telecommuting, remote work, telework, work from home, work at home, work from home mom