I’ve been wanting to get off Facebook for quite a while – it was fun at first but I’d like to use social media more productively. I created a new page, https://www.facebook.com/ruth.m.nasrullah, which is intended to be strictly a professional page. I spent a long time today going through statuses on my personal page, making most of them closed to public view in an attempt to make that page a little more professional-looking. I didn’t really have to do that, but I guess it reinforced the transition at least in my own head.
It also took me all day to decide what user name to give the page. My personal page is ruth.nasrullah, and for some reason I thought I could use the name ruth-nasrullah for the new page, but alas, no. I couldn’t use rnasrullah either, since that belongs to an engaging young Iraqi girl. Then I tried ruthnasrullah, but that wasn’t available (presumably I essentially already took it, despite the dot in between my first and last names). Then I thought maybe ruthmnasrullah would work, but it was too long and looked confusing. Perhaps ruthnasrullah.writer? In the end I went with the very simple ruth.m.nasrullah.
The one additional complication is that I just printed 250 business cards that have the ruth.nasrullah page on them, but I put a post on the old page directing folks to the new.
Wow, that whole thing was exhausting. Now I just need to figure out how to use Twitter and other social media so that I’m letting people know what I’m doing but using the right tone and level of professionalism.
Ruth Nasrullah 
Hey Ruth! Branding yourself on the various social media networks is really important for the kind of message you want to convey to the world. I think you’ll do great because you’re a writer and blogger at heart.
I use my personal and my professional pages to “get the word out” for my business efforts because I’ve gotten business from both. I totally understand the privacy issues that many people are facing these days though and a level of privacy is needed for everyone, even bloggers like ourselves.
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks, Rachel. I was finding myself logging many hours perusing my friends’ FB statuses and randomly posting my own thoughts; now I plan to just use the professional page and forget about all the other FB stuff. I already feel liberated!
That, unfortunately, happens to the best of us, Ruth! 🙂 I too want to know what’s going on in the lives of my friends but I am trying to create excellent content and use Facebook more for research. It’s good to feel liberated! Cheers!