In a remarkably short period of time, social media has changed just about every aspect of our lives. Many of those changes have been good; the ability to connect with distant friends and family and share what’s going on in your lives, to meet new people, and to promote businesses and brands. Needless to say, the proliferation of social media has also brought some negative changes to our world; particularly, the deepening divisions between people. The pandemic and its various impacts – masks and vaccines, especially – politics, and world events are all fertile ground for disagreement and debate.
The pros and cons of social media aside, it also is a consideration for job seekers – an increasingly important one. Our presence on social media has become part of our identity – at least our online identity. While it’s not universal, it’s becoming more common for recruiters and employers alike to check out the social media presence of candidates they’re considering. Whether right or wrong, it’s possible that a hiring manager could discount a candidate based on an opinion that disagrees (or is perceived to disagree) with a company value, on lifestyle choices (being perceived as a party hound and a heavy drinker, for example), or on something as harmless – and ubiquitous – as venting and complaining about your current or previous job. That being the case, if you’re in the market for a job (or might be at some point in the future), you’ve got to consider what they’d see.
Let’s look at the three most common personal social media platforms – Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook – and the ways to protect your online brand on each one.
This photo-sharing platform is the easiest to cover, so we’ll start here. Instagram has been around long enough – twelve years, believe it or not – that its first users (who were probably quite young at that point) are now well into their careers. The biggest risk with Instagram is photos that show aspects of your lifestyle that don’t reflect well on you at your current career stage. To be safe, there are two simple steps to take with this platform. First, set your account to ‘private’, so that anyone who wants to see the content you post must be a follower of yours. Since you’re at it, you may also want to take a look through your followers list to make sure that you still want to be connected to the ones who are already there. Then – if you’re in any doubt – simply scroll back and ‘curate’ your posts, deleting anything that you feel could come back to haunt you. If you don’t want to delete posts altogether, you can also set the privacy on individual posts so that only you can see them. That takes care of your own activity on Instagram, but there’s one last setting you should consider: making it so you have to approve being tagged in someone else’s photo.
Twitter has become known as a platform where differences of opinion can become heated, and the nature of the platform makes each user’s activity very public, by default and by design. This makes Twitter the social media platform where even innocuous opinions can be misconstrued or taken out of context, and blown out of proportion. If you tend to use Twitter as a platform for engaging in healthy debate, the good news is that it has no requirements for users to use their own name. You can therefore create a completely anonymous account to weigh in on politics or anything else (being mindful, of course, that it’s always possible – with enough knowledge and time – to trace an account back to its owner). If you’ve posted tweets in the past that you’re concerned about, there’s an easy fix. Set your account to ‘private’, and once again, only your followers will be able to read your posts – current and past. This covers both your original posts, as well as any replies to others. Other users will now need your approval to follow you and see what you’ve posted. Like Instagram, you may also want to review your current followers and trim that list down to people you know and trust.
Facebook is a somewhat more complicated platform to curate. Your own personal Facebook page is quick and easy. With one click in the privacy settings, you can make it so that only your direct connections on Facebook can see what you’ve posted on your page, ever. (Of course, it’s not a bad idea to take a run through your list of ‘friends’ to make sure that they are, indeed, still friends.)
Simple, right? Not so fast. Your privacy settings have no effect on things you’ve posted on other people’s pages, on business pages, or in groups. In those cases, what others can see depends on that page’s privacy settings. On a public page or group, for example, anyone can see every post and comment ever made. Facebook also doesn’t make it easy to view all of the comments and posts you’ve made on other pages, so – for better or for worse – consider what you’ve posted as being more or less permanent. With Facebook, then, the best approach is to let time take care of the past. The nature of the platform is that new content buries the old. Be aware, then, that some of your previous activity is visible, and from this point forward keep that in mind when posting anything new on any page other than your own.
When using any one of these platforms (or any others that are sure to follow), there’s one caveat to keep in mind: a screenshot is forever. Someone who’s connected with you can capture something you’ve posted, and if they do, that post is no longer assured to remain private. A hasty comment, later deleted, can still hurt you. So think before you post.
A job seeker on the market has always had employers and recruiters evaluating their presence. In the past, it was resumes and cover letters, and the third-party perspective of your references. Now, your digital footprint is a significant part of your identity. Maintaining control over that presence is crucial. (On that note, you may be wondering why LinkedIn isn’t mentioned here. The use of LinkedIn as a job seeker is less about editing what’s there and keeping it private, and more about building the kind of presence you want to project. For that reason, we’ll look at LinkedIn in a separate article later.)
I’ll leave you with one failsafe strategy for using social media – as a jobseeker or in life generally – that has become a bit cliche but no less true for it: In a world where you can choose to be anything, choose to be kind.