How to Balance your professional and personal privacy on Social Networks such as Facebook

With the explosion in the use of social networking tools such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and so on, it is important to be able to balance the use of it while keeping professional and personal lives separate.
Most of us use Facebook to stay in touch with friends, but are also Facebook “friends” with professional contacts, and social acquaintances with whom we are not particularly close
Like the average Facebook user, you have most likely been tagged in a variety of pictures; family pictures of yourself as a kid as well as pictures of yourself going out with the your fellow girlfriends. How do you balance sharing these pictures with those that are close to you while remaining professional with your work contacts and cordial with your acquaintances?
Think of social networking as a big highway that everyone has access to. Our profiles are a network of highways that we can decide to make available to people.
To effectively manage this, remember in life, there are public roads and there are private roads that you need special access to get to. Likewise on most social networking platforms, most of the profiles are public until you make them private.
We will use Facebook as an example.

You can create categories such as: Friends, Family and Professional. Once you do that, put each of your friends in the appropriate category. Then, set the properties for each of those categories so that each category can see only what you decide is relevant to them. If you want your family to have access to all your pictures and albums then you can set that up the property settings. If you want your professional contacts to only have access to certain picture albums of where you have attended work events, then you can set that up as well.
You can even determine who has access write on your wall. All in all, if you take 5 minutes to manage your social networking preferences, you can have a liberating, safe and dually private and public social networking experience.