Your Co-Workers Probably Don’t Want You to Follow Them on Social Media

Becoming actual friends with a co-worker often comes with some clear signals on each of your parts but becoming social media “friends” can be a fraught decision to accept, ignore, or reject an invitation to connect. Sometimes it’s not even based on how much you like the person, but on how much of a risk it can be to your job. 

To get insight into how people handle it, All About Cookies surveyed 1,500 US adults about how their online presence relates to their work relationships(Opens in a new window). It found that a third of people (33%) prefer not to connect with their co-workers on social media. For 12% of those surveyed, it’s simply because they don’t use social media enough to feel the need to connect with anyone new on there, co-workers included. 

But most avoided accepting or sending invitations because they want to keep their work and personal lives separate (62%). Some would rather their co-workers did not know about their lives (28%), and others just did not want to know more about their co-workers (18%). 

And then there are the people who want to let loose on social media in a way that they don’t feel they could with co-workers looking on; 15% said they did not want to censor themselves on social media and 8% said they did not want co-workers to see what they posted about work. 

Whether or not you have added work people to your social media circles, what you post has the potential to be seen by or get back to your co-workers and supervisors. Over a quarter of those surveyed (27%) saw a co-worker post something negative relating to work and 24% said that someone they know at work had been disciplined over a post. Ten percent witnessed a co-worker get fired because of something they’d put up on social media.

(Credit: All About Cookies)

But despite the best efforts to keep business and personal separate, people do find themselves linked up with co-workers on Facebook (85%), Instagram (59%), Snapchat (57%), TikTok (47%), and Twitter (47%). If that’s you, the good news is that these connections make 50% of people like their co-workers more while for 44%, it didn’t change their opinions of them one way or another. Only 6% felt that social media gave them a newly negative opinion of a colleague.

(Credit: All About Cookies)

If you’re on the fence about adding someone you know through work to your social media circles, you’ll do best to ask them in-person first (24% said this was the most appropriate time), preferably after socializing outside of work (which 18% said was the right time).