Facebook is a great tool for staying in touch with friends, and it's also a great tool for connecting with your business' customers. It can be a little tricky to use it for both at once, however, without getting some crossover between the two groups.

Chances are many of your personal updates won't be of interest to most of your customers, and your friends and family might get sick of seeing posts about your company. In this article, we're going to look at a couple of ways to keep the two separated.

At first glance, the easiest solution would appear to be to simply set up two separate accounts - one personal account and one business account. Unfortunately, this is against Facebook's terms of service - you are only allowed to have one account.

The first option for keeping the two groups separated is to set up separate lists and sort your friends according to the context. For example, you could make a "Business" list and a "Personal" list and add people to the appropriate one.

When you post something, you can either send it to all your friends or you can pick a specific list to send it to. If you post something to your Personal list, the people on your Business list wouldn't see it, and vice versa.

This keeps things nicely separated, but it does have one drawback - you need to remember to specify a list to send it to. If you forget that step when you post something, it will go out to everyone.

Another potential problem with this strategy is that Facebook limits you to 5,000 friends. There obviously aren't too many people who are going to have that many friends, but if you're using Facebook for business reasons it's a lot more likely that you could be connected with that many people.

By using a Facebook Page instead of simply adding everyone to a friends list, you avoid this limitation - Pages don't have a limit.

Using a Page will also keep your personal and business interactions even more independent of one another. Facebook recently added the ability to "Use Facebook as a Page" which means that everything you do will appear to be coming from the Page rather than your personal profile.

So any business-related interactions can be handled while you're active as your Page, and any personal interactions can be done while you're logged in with your personal profile.