WTF? Friday: Four Ways Facebook and LinkedIn are Different

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/TimFree/status/112157907902136322″]

My friend Tim fired off a cranky tweet this morning — and I agree with it wholeheartedly. Four ways Facebook and LinkedIn are different:

1. LinkedIn is specifically for business relationships; for the most part, your friends on Facebook aren’t there to do business.
2. A person’s LinkedIn profile is their resume. A person’s Facebook profile often tells you far less about the person professionally, and more about them personally.
3. We connect to people on LinkedIn to improve our careers, to endorse others with whom we do business and to seek new opportunities. We connect with people on Facebook to find out if that guy we went to high school with is still hot. (Pro tip: he’s not.)
4. Facebook calls connections “friends” which is amusing and mislabeled. I’m not really friends with most of the people I’ve “friended” on Facebook. LinkedIn connections, however, should be held to a higher standard; it will happen you will be the link between person A and person B and if person A asks you for a reference regarding person B, you don’t want to say, “I don’t really know them.”

So don’t go accepting all those offers to connect on LinkedIn willy-nilly, you dope. Make sure they’re people with whom you actually have a relationship you can reference.