With the deadline of many summer jobs and internships quickly approaching, making an effort to keep your public online presence professional matters. According to recent statistics, 75% of Human Resources Departments Google their applicants. Thanks to the ease of navigating the Internet and the advent of social media, anything internship coordinators and potential employers can find out about you online “goes”.
You have probably been told to be careful of what you post. While a negative online presence no doubt influences potential employers’ hiring decisions, remember that a positive online presence can be just as influential. Employers and internship coordinators can make their decisions based in part on what information you make available online, both the positive and the negative. Read on for four easy ways to improve your public online presence professionally.
1. Create a LinkedIn profile and make an effort to maintain it
This one should be a given, but just in case you don’t have a LinkedIn account yet, make one and keep it active and up-to-date. Read this article for some great tips!
2. Create a profile on Brandyourself.com
This website and Online Reputation Management company originated as a startup by Syracuse University students. It allows you to create your own professional webpage, while also helping refine your personal search results. Your BrandYourself profile is automatically optimized to show up high in Google searches, and you can “submit” links (e.g. your Linkedin profile, your Twitter, or your personal website) that will then be “boosted” to show up high in searches, as well.
3. Create a profile on Vizify.com
Think of this website as the more laid-back, info-graphics version of your Linkedin profile. According to their website, Vizify “helps you transforms all those interesting impressions you make online into one definitive, multidimensional, graphical biography.” You can add information about your education, work experience, and pretty much anything you want. You can also add links to your other profiles and relevant websites.
4. Set your Facebook to private and hide it from public search results
Even if you don’t have anything “bad” to hide, it may be a good idea to keep your personal life, as depicted by Facebook, separate from your professional life. Quoting Libby Kane from LearnVest, “There is a difference between professional networking and personal networking.” Of course, whether you wish to keep your Facebook set as viewable to “only friends” and hidden from public search results depends entirely on how comfortable you, as an individual, are willing to publicly share that personal information.
If you don’t want your Facebook to show up in the results when potential employers and internship coordinators run a Google search on you, be sure to edit your privacy settings on Facebook so that other search engines (e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo Search) can’t find you. You can also turn off the features that allow people to find you by email address and phone number.
Keeping other social media set to private may also be a good call, but it’s completely up to you and highly depends on the content you post. It’s definitely possible to maintain your professional presence using Twitter, for example. On the other hand, maintaining your professional presence on a social media format like Instagram may be a little more difficult.
We all have an online presence in some way, and with everything online now we must be aware of what we choose to make visible. There are amazing opportunities to build your reputation through online resources, but there are also poor pictures and status updates we mindlessly posted that may hurt us if we do not take the right steps.
Sources:
brandyourself.com
hercampus.com/school/bc
learnvest.com/2013/03/8-mistakes-not-to-make-on-linkedin/
vizify.com