Your social media is just for you and your friends and family to enjoy, right? Not so much if you’re trying to pursue new career opportunities. According to CareerBuilder, about 70% of employers check out potential candidates’ social media profiles. That means that if you don’t have everything on lock-down and completely private, you might want to do a quick check to be sure you’re presenting yourself in the best possible light.
Remember, you are your #1 marketing tool. So let’s get right to the moves you can make to ensure your social media habits are in line with pursuing a new career.
Update Your Profile Picture
Sure, the photo of you playing drinking games with your closest friends on the beach holds all sorts of carefree memories for you. But is that the image you want the hiring committee to see when they search for you online? By keeping an up-to-date image as your profile picture and by keeping it professional, you’ll have a better chance of avoiding any misconceptions about who you are outside of your online presence.
Pay Attention to the Details
It’s easy to let things go unnoticed on your profiles, too. You’ll want to check to see what groups you’re a part of and who you’re following. Check to be sure that the things you’re advertising as “you” are still relevant to who you are today. You might even have accidentally joined groups out of curiosity that you later realized were not what you actually intended. Doing a quick check of who you’re following is a good idea since those “follows” can really pile up.
It doesn’t hurt to check for how you’re presenting yourself in your writing as well. If you’re posts are full of misspellings and incorrect grammar, then do a clean-up. Sprucing up your writing shows potential employers that you know how to pay attention to details…and everyone wants a detail-oriented employee!
Delete, Delete, Delete
Certainly, who you are today is different than the person you were in the past, so your best bet is to delete any content that you feel might not reflect the current self- and globablly-aware person you have become. We all go through positive and negative periods of our personal and professional lives, so it’s important to run through old posts and images to make sure a stranger can look at your profile and see the best of you.
Keep your profiles professional by running them by your instincts. If you’ve still got the rowdy images of you partying in your younger years visible, then it’s time to update your social media pages. Yes, that Cinco de Mayo party was one of the best nights of your life, but that doesn’t mean that things didn’t get messy and that your friends didn’t tag you in the photos as things went from casual fun to a wild night. And that post you made about your goofy, pitiful ex? That’s a good one to delete as well. You want your profiles to reflect who you are in the best possible light. If in doubt, make those images private or delete them all together.
You probably want to check your settings regarding who can tag you in photos, too. Just because you’re profile is cleaned up doesn’t mean your friends don’t still have you tagged in their profiles.
Professional Profiles
When you have a professional profile on a site like LinkedIn, you will want to maintain that, too. If that profile has been sitting idle for five years, it’s time to get it together. Update your profile picture, your skills and achievements, your email address, and your work history.
When it comes to professional profiles, you should keep your connections career-focused. Your professional profile is not the place to voice political opinions or the frustrations of your daily life. Leave that to your private conversations with friends and family. Remember that by keeping your professional profiles professional, you’re ensuring that no misconceptions will be made about who you are as a person and candidate for a future career.
Keep in mind that you want to give potential employers an idea of who you will be as an employee, so cleaning up personal accounts and maintaining professional accounts is a great way to ensure you’re behaving as your own best marketing tool.
Washington Technical Institute
If you’re wondering how you can make a positive impression as a job candidate by updating your skills, Washington Technical Institute’s fully online certificates can be completed in a matter of months, with daily or bi-weekly start dates. Such flexible start dates make these programs unique and much more accessible for our students. An additional benefit of WTI’s programs is that we offer affordable pricing and monthly payments to help our students leave school without debt.
Although our goal is to help our students graduate their programs with little to no debt, we also recognize that some students might need to utilize a loan for their educational investment. We are excited to announce our partnerships with Climb Credit or Ascent, student lending companies focused on financing career-building programs.
If you’re ready to enroll and start your training to enter a high-paying career without adding a four year or two year college degree, you can register for your program online through our website. Still have questions about our programs? Feel free to call us at 800-371-5581 or text us at 952-465-3702. Our admissions specialists will be happy answer whatever questions you have.
