As someone who currently has more than 2,000 “friends” and roughly 4,500 “fans” (or “likes”) on Facebook, I’m starting to see the need for another category.

Facebook needs to integrate a second friends list, LinkedIn-style, for professional contacts. It would lie somewhere between a fan page and a friends list, allowing people to easily connect with each other, in a social media kind of way, but without having to necessarily classify each other as “friends.”

I have a great many professional contacts in different business worlds. My LinkedIn profile features “connections” with many of them, but I don’t ever use it. In fact, beyond seeing other “connections”, six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon style, I’m not sure I see the use of LinkedIn at all. Facebook has a far more robust and familiar approach to social networking. Heck, it’s even got an Oscar-nominated movie named for it. So why not expand the tool everyone is already familiar with to include the business world, keeping it separate from personal life?

I can’t classify my professional contacts as fans. Some may be, but most are not. But I also can’t classify most of them as friends. I don’t hang out with them on the weekends and generally only talk to them when the conversation is relevant to what we both do. And yet I still have them on my Facebook “friends” list, where they can read where I went today, perhaps see a photo of what I ate or what my cat was doing, and likely learn more about my daily life than a professional contact really ought to know. But I don’t want to “unfriend” them, as firing off a quick Facebook message to them is often more helpful than e-mail or even a phone call.

So where do professional contacts fit in on Facebook? Perhaps they should they be “friends,” even if it’s only a professional friendship. Or perhaps Facebook needs a new list that shows the world that you know someone, enables you to talk to and share things with them as needed, but also allows a certain level of privacy to let you share your personal activities with your actual friends and leave everyone else out of it.

What do you think? (Feel free to “like” this, whether you’re a friend, fan, professional contact, or someone I don’t even know…)