Managing your online presence: Professionalism

I started to use the internet a lot when I was about 13. Naturally, I have quite an embarrassing online paper trail from that time. I had an email address that included the words "dazzle" and "dust", a myspace page that was customised to within an inch of its life, and I'm sure there are still very sparkly websites floating around in cyberspace that I created years ago.

Now that I've matured a little I'd like to put a different message about myself out into the world, and I'm very careful about what I display on social media in particular. I'm convinced that a lot of employers scout the Facebook pages of potential employees, and I'm always conscious of making sure that my online persona reflects the kind of image that I'd like them to see. It's important to show personality, as that's what's going to make you stand out from the crowd, but if you want to be taken seriously then it might mean displaying a more polished version of you online.

As a rule of thumb I would strongly recommend that you only post and share content that you would be happy for anyone to see, as anything that is posted online is open to the public (no matter how private you believe it is). Although it's possible to limit the amount most people can see on a lot of social media platforms, for example twitter and instagram make it very simple to have a private account, potentially embarrassing things always find a way to leak through.

Here are my tips:

1. Go through your social networks and any other websites that you have an account with, and check that you are still happy with the image it projects about yourself on each one

2. Have a professional email address

3. Update your privacy settings on Facebook and other social networks…

4. …but still don't share content that you wouldn't be happy for everyone to see