Why Your Social Media History Matters More Than Ever

Uses a smartphone or mobile phone to use social media but the post has been deleted on a virtual screen, Find more internet search engine opPhoto byrawintanpin / Adobe Stock

If you use social media, there have probably been times when you posted thoughts or images that you later regretted. A survey by YouGov, for instance, finds that two out of three users of social media in America admit to having put out at least one post that they regretted.

More than ever before, employers and colleges look at the social media profiles of applicants before making up their minds about taking them on. If you believe that you might have objectionable material on your social mediaaccounts that could hurt your chances, you would want to delete it prior to sending out resumes.

While it can be difficult to completely scrub your social media accounts clean, there are things that you can do to make sure that your accounts represent who you are today, not the person you were when you made youthful indiscretions.

What follows are suggestions on the steps that you need to take to clean up your social accounts and make them employment-ready or college-ready.

Archive Inappropriate Images or Videos.

Before you set out to perform a deep clean of your Facebook account, it would be a good idea to determine what exactly is worth keeping, and what you can afford to lose.

Just as you’d want to avoid having potential employers see objectionable content, you’d want to make sure that you leave the good content up in place, to help them see you in a positive light.

Images and videos can help employers understand a job applicant’s personality and interests, to see if they go with the company’s culture and values. Your goal should be to identify just the images that paint you in an unflattering light and to make sure that the remaining images stay up.

Be Conservative When You Try To Determine What Is Appropriate and What Isn’t.

Potential employers may not share the cool and permissive sensibilities you have. When you try to determine what kinds of posts are inappropriate, you need to think the way people do when they’re older and somewhat conservative.

You need to think about more than just posts that you may have made yourself. You need to look at anything you may have shared or liked, as well.

It can help to keep in mind incidents from the past such as the one in which Harvard University, in 2017, took back the admissions offers it had extended to a handful of students after the admissions officers found that they had been active on a Facebook group to do with explicit memes.If you’re in doubt about the appropriateness of a post, it should probably go.

Go Through Your Blog Posts With a Fine Tooth Comb.

If you currently publish a blog, or used to a while ago, it could be of interest to potential employers, who could learn something about your thoughts and philosophy reading it.

Whether you believe your blog is able to offer relevant information to potential employers or not, you need to go through it to see what kind of information it contains.

Inappropriate content could come with professional implications for you. Brand relationships and copyright law violations may be other areas that you need to pay attention to.

Try Googling Yourself.

Most recruiters will begin to look for information on job applicants on Google. Getting on Google, then, would be a good idea.

You could look at what kind of information turns up — inappropriate comments, embarrassing pictures, or posts on questionable forums.

While there’s little you can do about what turns up on Google, being aware of what’s visible on Google about you allows you to be prepared, should questions about it come up at interviews.

Go Over Your X (Twitter) Account.

X (Twitter) messages may be short, but they can offer readers a great deal of insight into the people who make them.

You need to go over your tweets from the past, and make sure that you’ve said nothing that could be seen as mean, or offensive. Even tweets from years ago can turn up when people search for them.You want to delete such tweets.

It would also be a good idea to look at who you’re following, and who follows you, to make sure that these are associations that reflect well on you.

It can take considerable patience, time, and effort to clean up your social accounts, but it’s likely to be effort that pays off. Employers who consider hiring you will do due diligence before taking a call.

It’s also a good idea to remind yourself to be careful about what you post to social media in the future.

You don’t want pictures of drunken escapades, bachelor or hen parties you’ve attended, and various indiscretions, to determine the future course of your life.

Nothing is private once you put it on the internet. It’s important to be careful.