If you are a home-based professional, it is important to stay connected to other professionals. There are a variety of ways to do this, including attending local seminars that are presented for other people with the same profession, joining a local chapter of the Rotary or Elks club or a similar civic organization whose membership is largely comprised of local business people, or joining an online chat or discussion group where professionals get together to talk shop. There are also plenty of social media opportunities for professionals to connect via sites like LinkedIn.
Today I learned about another type of social media app that can keep professionals connected. BeKnown is an app that works with Facebook. It was created by online job search giant Monster.com. I decided to check it out and see what BeKnown is all about.
In order to get the full BeKnown experience, after reading about the app for a few minutes I decided to go all out and try it for myself. You can join after being invited by one of your Facebook friends or you can look up the app online and join that way. Like other Facebook apps, BeKnown asks you for permission to access information from your profile so that it can build your BeKnown profile and suggest connections. One thing that I noticed while setting up BeKnown is that it lets you choose what to share from your Facebook profile and what to keep private. For example, you can set your BeKnown profile picture to a different picture than you have as your Facebook profile. This and other features let you keep your activities on BeKnown to strictly business.
Setting up BeKnown was easy. I decided to check out the “jobs” section to see what kinds of things are posted there. There are a ton of jobs available, but most of them are not freelance work. Most of the jobs are traditional jobs. I did notice that I can post information about my own businesses, so I think that will be the next step. Since BeKnown is fairly new, I do not think that many people are using it just yet. It seems easy to use and has the potential to be a good professional networking tool. Whether it will end up being something that I stick with in the long term remains to BeKnown. Also, be careful because you can go right to your Facebook page from the top of the screen, just like with other Facebook apps. Yeah, I’ll admit it, I got sucked in.
Photo by omdur on morguefile.com.