Use Social Media to Clean Up Your Online Profile

If you did not already know it, your online profile can haunt you in many ways.

More and more employers are now checking prospective employees’ online reputations, and negative or inappropriate information can eliminate your chances at a job.

On the other side of the coin, a high-profile blowup on a company’s social media page can create a lot of bad press and headaches.

But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

There are several things you can do to clean up your online presence using your various social media accounts.

Start with an online audit

Your first step should be to run a Google search on your name or your business name.

This search can turn up potentially inappropriate posts on your own profiles, as well as negative comments made by other people about you.

Run your search once while logged in to Google, and once while logged out. The first will let you see what your friends and colleagues can see, while the other shows what strangers (and prospective employers or customers) will see when they search for your name.

Don’t stop with Google.

Check Bing, Yahoo, Ripoff Report, and other sites where your name might come up. Any of these could hold information that could damage your reputation.

Make a cleanup checklist based on your audit

Once you’ve performed your searches and identified any potential problems, it’s time to come up with a comprehensive checklist of everything that needs to be cleaned up.

This could include old social media accounts you no longer use, negative reviews, photos of you that show drinking or other inappropriate behavior, or any number of other harmful posts. Make a note of what sites they’re on, and where they showed up in search results (first page? Above your own website?).

Start the cleanup (or assign someone to do it)

This may be the most time consuming part of the process.

If you’re an individual, you’ll need to adjust your privacy settings on your various social media profiles to hide your more unsavory posts. You’ll also need to try to contact friends or family who have tagged you in inappropriate photos.

In the event you’re cleaning up your business profile, you may also have to contact customer service at various social media sites to remove old, unused profiles or remove reviews with false information.

Start rebuilding your online presence

Once you’ve completed the cleanup process (and even during the process), start rebuilding your online reputation via your social network profiles.

Come up with a strategy and goals for what you want your online presence to do for you, whether that’s landing a big job or improving customer relations.

Another great way to start rebuilding your social presence is through Google Plus.

Because Google gives special consideration to users of its own social network, you may find your own posts starting to rise through the search rankings — and negative information getting pushed down where fewer people will stumble across it.

Taking the time to remove personal information from your online profile can seem like a daunting task.

By forming a strategy for finding and eliminating negative information, you can make the process far less painful.

Photo credit: technewsworld.com

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