LEGAL CENTS: BranchOut: Keeping it (sort of) professional on Facebook

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BranchOut just can’t decide what it wants to be when it grows up.

The free, year-old professional networking app for Facebook is often referred to as “LinkedIn for Facebook.”

After spending a little time experimenting with it, I’ve concluded that it’s got some useful features for lawyers, along with a few that seem, well, a little juvenile. In short, I don’t think LinkedIn has to worry about BranchOut overtaking it as the top professional networking site anytime soon.

BranchOut bills itself as “the largest professional networking service on Facebook” – but are there others? It also touts operating “the largest job board on Facebook with over 3 million jobs and more than 20,000 internships.”

The central idea behind BranchOut – and it’s a good one — is you can mine friends of your Facebook friends to form professional affiliations, though you aren’t necessarily interested in becoming Facebook friends with them. It’s a place to keep it professional on Facebook, for job hunters or people who are otherwise looking for business opportunities, who already have large and diverse friend rosters on Facebook.

If you’re a lawyer with profiles on both LinkedIn and Facebook, I’m guessing you have more connections on the latter. This is just one more way to reach more connections.

You do have to be on Facebook to set up a BranchOut profile, by the way.

It’s easy to use. You begin by logging in and allowing access to your Facebook account. It’s simple to then create your profile by importing a resume. Apparently, it used to be even easier, by just connecting BranchOut to your LinkedIn profile, but LinkedIn put a stop to that earlier this summer.

Still, it didn’t take me any longer than 10 minutes to post an abbreviated resume and to change the main image from the cute photo of my kids that I’m currently posting on Facebook to a professional headshot.

Along these lines, BranchOut members can see only your BranchOut profile, not your Facebook page and its status updates or photo albums.

When I joined BranchOut, I discovered that just six of my 170 Facebook friends had already joined. But, the beauty of BranchOut is, it tells you where all of your friends’ friends are employed. So from just six people, I suddenly obtained access to 3,572 second-degree connections at 2,443 companies.

You can search those companies to discover insiders among them who are friends of Facebook friends.

Imagine how many potential connections and company contacts I’d have if all of my Facebook friends joined BranchOut.

BranchOut also lets you post jobs and internships, see jobs that second-degree connections have posted and enter search terms for jobs on the Web.

But it’s not all positive.

Among the features I’m less sold on, and where LinkedIn has the edge, is that BranchOut allows you to “endorse” your Facebook friends. Like a Tweet, you can only use 140 characters or fewer. So it’s much faster than writing a recommendation on LinkedIn. Brevity is nice for the writer, certainly. But I’m not sure how useful that feature really is for the person getting endorsed or a third-party viewer, compared to a lengthier recommendation on LinkedIn, where I can tell someone really put some time and thought into drafting a narrative that gives some useful detail.

Also, BranchOut frequently asks you to invite your Facebook friends to join your network or “expand your empire,” as they put it. The default way to invite them is obnoxious: It posts your invite on their wall. That’s just marketing for BranchOut, and I declined.

But perhaps the least attractive feature is that BranchOut lets you send “badges” to your Facebook friends. Among the 58 options are “Smokin’ hot” and “World’s Best Boss.” So you can either sexually harass a coworker or be a complete suck-up to your boss. Um, BranchOut, I thought we were keeping it professional here?

Go ahead – create a BranchOut profile. Add it to your box of marketing tools, but don’t consider it a LinkedIn replacement just yet.

Jane Pribek is a former family law attorney and former editor of Wisconsin Law Journal. Since moving to Nashville, she has been our editor-at-large. She can be reached at [email protected].