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Is it ok to try and connect with coworkers on social media, ie Facebook or Instagram? I genuinely like my coworkers and enjoy their company at work, and I do have one friend who has since left the company on Facebook. I would never add my boss or manager on social media, but what about other colleagues?

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    Groups are a great feature. You can put coworkers into the acquaintances group, which is pretty accurate for a coworker you are friendly with but won't necessarily be inviting to your birthday party or whatever. If you do start to hang with them simply change the group they are in to open them up to more of your feed. (I went on a ski trip with folks I had worked with and they became great friends so crossed over.)
    – simbo1905
    Commented Feb 4, 2016 at 0:29

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Connect with anyone you want. But first vet your posts to see if they are suitable for that audience. I don't post anything much work related and I'm not really interested in having others post anything about my work. So factor in considerations like that.

Also many of us have family on our fb and sometimes, not all of them are 'housetrained' and suitable for wide distribution if you know what I mean.

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It is not inappropriate (I have one or two) - but you do have to make some considerations:

  1. While it should be stated that you need to be careful with how you present yourself on social media, this gets more of an issue when you start adding workmates. Your new workmate friend may also be friends with another workmate who is friends with another colleague that you just bitched about - prepare for a frosty reception the next day. Or there's another chain to your boss and you've boasted about being hungover and calling in sick.

  2. Would you regularly socialise with them outside of work? This is usually my benchmark, and I generally don't add a workmate until he is already an outside-of-work mate. This is more of a preference.

  3. As Joe mentioned in his comment - some people are more guarded about who they add on social media, so don't read too much into it when someone rejects or doesn't respond to a friend request.

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Yes, it is completely okay to connect with co-workers on social networks; but only if you know them(in fact, if they know you) very well.

Generally, people wouldn't be willing to add people who they aren't close with or share a rapport with.

I would never add my boss or manager on social media

Just saying. If you have a nice rapport with your manager and/or your boss, you can definitely go ahead and send them a connection request on social network.

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This truly depends. You have to decide about your threshold of transparency. Adding colleagues can alter the tone and content of your postings.

I would not hesitate to add colleagues to my twitter account, linkedIn or Xing, and even Google+, but definitively not on facebook. Not because I post inappropriate stuff, but because of visibility of my friends' posts. ("Friends of friends" and "public").

I am not afraid of what my friends post, but there is the occasional slip of family members that I can hide from my timeline, but not others.

I have decided on the level of transparency on all of my networks. I use them primarily as an outlet for my blog. My blog is in a rather different field of interest (christian theology) than my profession (computer programming), thus my colleagues might not be interested anyway. And that is another criteria for me: what do I focus on, and do interests overlapp.

Younger people than me (baby boomer) have a different attitude towards transparency. If your workplace consists of Generation Xers and Millenials, you might be more prone and open to add them. Members of the baby Boomer generation see things totally different and I would be more cautious.

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