Cleaning Up Your Social Media For Employers: 4 Tips You Don’t Want To Miss

If you’re about to enter the job market following graduation, you may want to clean up your social media accounts to make sure that potential employers don’t look at your accounts and find something that sways their final hiring decision. Even immature posts that you wrote while in college could cause prospective employers to look for someone else to hire. Keep in mind that upwards of 70 percent of all employers checked social media when screening candidates in 2017. While you shouldn’t need to get rid of your social media profiles altogether, it may be wise to clean these profiles of content that might not paint your online reputation in the perfect light.

Keep Your Personal Accounts Separate From Professional Accounts

For future posts on social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, it’s important that you separate your personal accounts from your professional accounts. In general, you should avoid posting about political views, religious views, and personal information on any of your professional accounts. You should also look through your history on your main social media accounts to determine if any content you posted in the past would be considered as controversial. If so, you should think about deleting it. By creating a professional account, you can keep it separate from any private and personal account that you have. Try to avoid vulgar language as well.

Increase Security on Personal Accounts

If you don’t want all of your content on your social media pages to be viewable by prospective employers, increase security on these accounts. On Facebook, it’s possible to change privacy settings that will take into account all of your future posts. You can also limit who gets to see your past posts by restricting this content to friends only. As for Twitter, the privacy settings aren’t as robust as those on Facebook. Make sure that you switch off location, which ensures that your location isn’t viewable with each tweet. You might also want to make your tweets private by clicking on the “Protect My Tweets” button.

Remove Any Content, Posts, and Likes That Could Be Deemed Inappropriate

What was appropriate 10 years ago may now be considered as inappropriate, which is a mindset that you should have when cleaning up your social media pages. Make sure that you remove all content, posts, and likes from your social media that could be immature or inappropriate for employers. It’s also important that your professional accounts are up-to-date.

Even if most of your social media accounts are kept private, employers will still be able to view your profile picture, which is why it’s recommended that this picture reflects well on you. If you don’t want to go through your entire post history on Facebook and Twitter, consider using the Scrubber tool, which will identify content that could be a red flag for potential employers.

Download Facebook Data

It’s possible to go a step further when cleaning your social media pages by downloading all of your Facebook data, which can be done via the settings page on your Facebook profile. Once you have downloaded this information, you can view it to better identify any content and posts that you’ve “liked” in the past, some of which could be red flags for employers.

Even though there are some employers who don’t check social media when screening potential employees, cleaning up your social media pages will invariably improve your chances of getting a job. You also don’t want to miss out on a job because of something you posted years ago. When you’re readying yourself to enter the job market, it’s important that you’re fully prepared for what this move entails.