Facebook friends with clients?

Didn't know whether this fit better under web sites or marketing.  But here it is

What are your thoughts on having clients friend you on Facebook?  I've gotten about half a dozen friend requests to my ProofBuddy email address.  I've just assumed they were spam, but it looks like at least a couple of them were from photographers.  My first thought is that I don't use my Facebook account for much, and the little it does get used for is to keep up with friends and I don't know that I want to get that mixed up with work.

Have any of y'all had success with people on Facebook?  Specifically has it helped either in getting new business or keeping in contact with existing clients?

I have some clients on there, but most of those also go to school or went to school with my daughter. Mixed blessing I think since it just adds more junk to my newsfeed that I don't care about, but it does seem to gain me two or three more every time I tag one of them to a photo. At least it gets me some more exposure. I have been thinking about making a strictly business page and using that instead to insulate my private life a bit.

I don't like Facebook at all, and I wouldn't miss it if it disappeared.  How can you have a personal or private section on a social networking site like that anyway?  It seems counterintuitive to me.  But then, I'm just a stick in the mud about the whole thing anyway.



Travis

It's just a matter of keeping up with technology.  A couple years ago MySpace was the popular place to hang out online.  Facebook was primarily for college students.  But it's now spread to where younger students are using Facebook along with people that used to be students.  I still don't understand the draw to following people on Twitter, but I have considered it as a marketing tool.

Almost seems like you need two accounts.  One for your personal life, one for your professional life.  The hard part would be keeping them separate. 

Recent example. Tagged a girl yesterday morning in a shot, yesterday afternoon had two new friend requests from it, one of which is inquiring about shots for her wedding. A sum total of 5min time while I was already at the PC loading images on my website, and 0$ in advertising costs. Like it or not, it works.

@Lauren - Can you explain groups in Facebook?  I've seen the add to group button when accepting friend requests but never used it.

The groups that you see when adding friends are for your own personal use. Pretty much you just categorize your friends. I have groups for my family, my close friends, people I went to church with in California, and people I go to church with in Utah. I also have a group of people that I want on my friends list, but I don't want them to see my contact information or other specifics about me. Whenever you are in your settings, if you click on "customize," there will be a box where you can type in a persons name, or a group name. For instance, if I don't want a certain 10 people to see my phone number then I can either type in their names or I can add them to a group and just type in the group name. Its faster to use the categories (groups) when there will be certain people that will be grouped together a lot. It works for privacy, or inviting people to events. A new setting even allows you to change your status and only let select people see it. Anywhere you can type in a name, you can also type in a group. But you can add all your clients to a group, and control what they see about you.

I hope this makes sense and I'm not just rambling on. 

P.S. I agree with what Bob said. Except that I like facebook better than myspace. Only because myspace has gotten so slow to load due to everyones videos, music, photos, slide shows, and other "special features" that they put on their profile pages. It takes 10 minutes to load some pages. But I do use both, also.