Different uses and gratifications of Facebook

Facebook is enjoying tremendous growth, now up to 80 million users and adding 250,000 new ones each day. Many of these users are older than the college students the platform originally was designed for. As Facebook becomes a more diverse community, users have different uses and gratifications for belonging to the online social network.

I personally use Facebook for many of the same reasons it was originally intended: to keep in touch with friends and share content with them. Still, I've noticed others use it to network professionally. Often, I receive friend requests from these users and am uncertain how to handle them, given that my uses and gratifications of Facebook are much different. I have no desire in being in touch on Facebook with colleagues I have a strictly professional relationship with. I recently agreed to participate in a panel discussion for a conference through a Facebook contact, around the same time I posted photos from my Sex and the City cosmopolitan party. For me, that's a bit awkward. While I was happy to have made the contact and benefited from the networking, I felt much more comfortable once our conversation moved to e-mail.

The local PRSA chapter I belong to has created a Facebook group and intends to use Facebook to communicate with members. While I can join the group and still have the option to keep my profile and photos set to friends only, this function does not fit into my uses and gratifications for the service. I'm wondering how many others like me are out there? I prefer to keep Facebook for personal use and LinkedIn for professional use. Certainly, I can't be the only one who doesn't want to mix business with pleasure. And if there are more of us, will we all end up fleeing to Bebo or some new platform as the professionals encroach?