#Restart: Why Social Media can Backfire on your Professional Image

Straight up #honesty

Let’s face it. Your social media profiles in recent years have become the biggest windows into how you are as a person. And even if they’re not supposed to, employers will definitely scout your social media pages to find more information. This means that every post you’ve publicly made would be fair game.

It was after thinking about this that I realized all the stupid, naive things I’ve shared ever since creating my social media accounts 7+ years ago.

Realistically speaking, seven years ago I was an entirely different person than I am now. I was:

• A fourteen year old freshmen in high school. Let’s be honest, every fourteen year old freshmen in high school is very immature. They make bad jokes along with having crude senses of humor, and in general are pretty hard to be around if you’re not on the same immaturity scale as they are. I was that kind of freshmen.
• A huge #gamer. Practically all I would do back in those days was game from the moment I got home to the time I went to sleep. I hardly game nowadays. If I do, it’ll only be an hour or two a week at the most.
• Very #sociallyawkward. I didn’t really know how to talk to people. I mean, I could at least convey useful information, but it was in a really blunt way. Far from professional. Over the years and with the help of working in retail and customer service positions I’ve really been able to come out of my shell and be more personable.
• Really big into things like rage comics and #manga. Not to take away from these interesting subcultures, but it kind of isolates the amount of things that you can talk about with other people. I still have the manga books that I used to collect, but I haven’t opened them in years. I’m still trying to find a way that I can sell or even donate them, maybe to a local library perhaps?

These are only a handful of things that I can remember from that time period. I’m sure there are other things that I was interested in that further polarized myself from normal society.

The Need for #professionalism

It wasn’t until I started working in more professional positions that I realized this kind of behavior needed to change. Not only did I need to grow more mature personally, but I also knew that my social networking accounts needed to mature accordingly.

In what I like to call #thegreatpurge of 2015, I set about sanitizing all of my social networks of inappropriate content, whether it be photos or news shared to public conversations with other people.

Tweet Delete is a great tool for getting rid of your old tweets.

I also used great third party tools like #tweetdelete ( http://www.tweetdelete.net/ ), which like the name implies, allows you to mass delete all of your tweets. All of my two thousand or so tweets perished in the purge. I now literally only have the five tweets needed for this class.

#Conclusion

Even if it seems like a big step to sanitize your social networks in the way I did, it’s more than worth it. Your public identity is by far the most important one you have in today’s society, so it only makes sense to go the extra mile to ensure that it’s as good as possible. Even by setting your accounts to private is better than having them out in the open for everyone to see because it doesn’t show all of your posts unless your friends with someone. I hope you take this into consideration, and happy #tweeting!