How to keep a clean and professional social media presence

By ALEXIS ZIRPMOULIS

Staff Writer

Is your private life truly private? Whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat, most college students juggle multiple social media accounts. When you are fresh out of college and looking to leap into your career, it is important to have a squeaky clean social media presence, or as close to clean as possible. However, with several virtual personas to manage, maintaining track of your photographs, status updates and videos can become a challenge- and that unfavorable Friday night selfie can easily get lost in the chaos of your archived photos.

Though social media may have been your favorite place to document your party pictures while living the college life, students’ social media accounts can appear to be far detached from their professional aspirations. Your social media accounts are often one of the first places your employer is able to view after you apply for a job. Employers want to know that you are professional and serious and in order to convince them, your social media presence needs to align with your career aspirations.

Here are three tips to maintaining a clean social media presence:

1. Have you ever tried to google yourself to see if anything, whether it be good or bad, appears within the first couple posts or images of the search results? This is how you will appear to potential employers. This should be your first step, as it will show you where your name appears across the internet. Using quotation marks around your name will help retrieve the closest matching results, as this process can be helpful for retrieving your online activity that may have been forgotten about over the past years.

2. Clean up your pictures. Some of us millennials have been on social media sites since middle school and it is well past time to venture back and delete anything embarrassing, irrelevant or inappropriate. After you have managed your photos your profile should become clean of all inappropriate gestures, clothing and basically anything else that you would not want your future employer to see.

3. Check your blogs. If you have ever blogged online, read through your posts to view how they make you seem. Blog writing can be professional, thoughtful and can potentially increase your chances at landing a job. However, other blog writing can be profane, immature and inappropriate. If you believe that your blog falls under one of these categories, direct your mouse towards the delete button.

Your social media accounts should be a representation of who you are. Always try your best to refrain from posting too much personal information or inappropriate posts, but do not be afraid to show your personality. The bottom line is your social media accounts are part of the public sphere, where all such things you post are documented, shared and judged. Always be mindful of what you post as the internet is forever.