Source: Wikicommons On Wednesdays, Dr. Jen answers your questions about social media. Need some advice? Submit a question anonymously here.
Dear Dr. Jen,
I'm a senior in college. I'll graduate in May and I'm starting the search for a job now. What do I do about my social media pages? Some people tell me to delete everything, other people tell me to make it look good for employers. I don't want to lose all my photos and online friends just to get a job! And what does it even mean to make my pages "look good" for companies? Help!
-EK
Dear EK,
Of the many ways you can divide the world into two groups of people, one is hoarders vs. purgers. Does it fill you with joy to lose the dead weight following you around online (I am definitely this kind of person) or does it fill you with dread to lose that big archive of memories? I can help either way, but knowing what type of person you are can lead you to the most comfortable strategy.
If you are a purger:
Welcome to my team! This is the perfect excuse to clean up your profiles. Take the opportunity to delete lots of old content, and drop friends you long-ago muted or just plain don't want to hear from anymore. Here are a few steps:
- Delete old content. You can do a lot of this automatically. Facebook Timeline Cleaner will help automatically delete posts in a given time range from Facebook. You don't need to lose everything when you do this; you can download an archive of all your Facebook activity first. If you're a Twitter user, use Tweet Delete to automatically delete posts older than a certain time. Google around for other tools for other platforms - you'll find them for Instagram, YouTube, and more.
The fact is, most of your posts are likely to be context-dependent and not have a ton of meaning once time has passed. You won't be losing much. - Drop old friends. Are you someone who approved a friend request from that person you met at a party once and never saw again? Or that person from high school who you never liked and don't want to hear from now? Unfriend them! I love big unfriending sessions - they are very therapeutic - but you can also do this a bit at a time. Every time you log in, consider each person you are seeing. Unfriend or unfollow the ones you're not interested in at the time. Repeat the process each time you log in. You'll shrink your friend / follow list quickly.
- With what's left, go through it with a critical eye. Pretend you are a person working at a company where you want to work. This person has taken an unfair dislike to you and is looking for dirt on your social media pages - stuff that makes you look bad, unreliable, unprofessional, or like a bad representative of the company. What would they use to persuade the committee that you shouldn't be hired? Delete that post haste! Be aggressive.
If you are a hoarder:
You should still probably delete some stuff. First download that archive of your Facebook content. Then:
- Use the same critical eye toward your posts. If you can't bear to delete them (which you really should do), hide them. Not every platform has this option, but some do. Hide them from everyone if you can, and make them private and accessible to only a trusted group if you can't be more restrictive. (then, separately consider if you really want companies to archive all your precious memories when they make money by selling access to them. you can probably do better...)
- Again, consider unfriending people. If you really can't make yourself do that, consider updating your privacy settings so only a smaller group of friends can see your content. You can do that with lists or custom privacy settings on many platforms.
For Everyone:
- Update your LinkedIn profile. This is where most employers are going to look and it means a lot to have a well-maintained and professional page there. Make sure all the resume-realted content is up to date, get people to "certify" you as an expert in certain areas, and make connections to lots of people (professors, fellow students and recent graduates, co-workers from internships and college jobs, people from back home [consider your friends' parents, for example], etc.). Those connections can get you access and will be valuable.
- Check your privacy settings. Consider that there may be people in the world who don't like you and who will use your online content against you. Do you really want these people seeing your Instagram / YouTube / Facebook / Twitter pages? The answer may be yes, and that's fine. However, if you have hesitations, consider stricter privacy settings. You can also temporarily strengthen them while you're on the job market. For example, restrict your Twitter feed only people you have approved to follow you.
- Google your name. What comes up? If there is anything embarrassing, you may be able to contact the site owner to have it removed. You may actually find old stuff you posted (a middle school blog, for example) that you now want to remove. Clean that up as well as you can.
Ultimately, companies are going to do searches on you because their clients will do searches on you. They don't want to be surprised by a conservative client discovering pictures of your drunk antics or that communist manifesto you wrote during the week you were a Marxist in your freshman year. This is not to say you can't have a social life online, but have it knowing that people will judge it. Take as many steps as you are willing to take in order to keep that content restricted to friends and out of the hands of enemies or non-social contacts.
Good luck in the search and in the social media cleanup!
-Dr. Jen
On Wednesdays, Dr. Jen answers your advice questions about social media. Have a question of your own? Submit it anonymously here.