Published on: July 8, 2025 at 3:54 pm
Given the reputational minefields of social media, it’s important for professionals to think carefully about their strategies for online connections.
Academy of Management Scholar Nancy Rothbard of the University of Pennsylvania said there are essentially four strategies that she and her colleagues identified in their research on this topic.
1. Being open, which is the letting-it-all-hang-out strategy. This yields higher rates of engagement, although TMI (too much information) may be a hazard if you’re not careful.
“The benefit of the open strategy is that it’s easy, and that you’re very authentic, and so that authenticity really comes through to your connections,” Rothbard said. “The risk is that you reveal something that is problematic in the eyes of one of the multiple audience members.
“This is really challenging, because there isn’t only one audience segment that you’re talking to when you’re on social media,” she said. “It’s a broad-based, non-tailored set of platforms.
“The default is to disclose the same information to a broad set of people, and so, if you’re open, whatever you’re saying is going to go to everybody, and some parts of your audience may love it, and some parts may hate it.”
2. Audience strategy, which refers to carefully curating who is in your audience, often deciding to have personal or professional connections (but not both). This includes making careful decisions about who to connect with and which requested followers to accept.
“This strategy means that you’re very open with all of your disclosures, but you’ve carefully vetted who sees it, and you’ve got a limited audience that you’ll reveal your thoughts and feelings to,” Rothbard said.
“The problem with that is that you don’t always control who your audience members will disclose your posts to, so your audience members could repost or like something that you’ve shared and that other people who are not in your audience could see, so there’s some risk there,” she said.
3. Content strategy, which is aiming for a big-tent audience of both personal and professional connections, but carefully curating content to disclose.
“You might be disclosing personal content online, but you’re disclosing a really carefully vetted set of curated content that is designed not to offend and to be disclosed to a broad set of audiences,” Rothbard said.
“It’s the one that I use personally, because you never know who’s going to see your online disclosures, but the risk there is that people could think of you as being too curated and not authentic,” she said.
4. Hybrid strategy, also referred to as custom strategy, is taking a customized approach of disclosing different information to different audiences.
“That strategy would be ideal, but it takes a ton of skill and time to do it well, so if you don’t have the skill and you don’t have the time, then it could backfire on you,” Rothbard said.
