Hi! I’m a senior this year applying to some pretty selective schools and had a couple questions about social media. My twitter page is by far the most ‘scandalous’. I swear occasionally on it and also retweet some tweets that swear as well. However, I’m never racist or anything crazy like that and am always respectful on my page. It is set to private and I only allow people I personally know to follow me on it. Should I still go through it and delete all the negative posts? On my instagram, it is public. But of course it is just pictures of me, my parent’s, my friends. Nothing bad. Maybe some of the captions can be seen as sarcastic but never rude. My facebook is entirely clean. it is a simple picture of my senior picture as a profile picture, and then I have not posted anything on it at all. Everything on my wall is 2 pictures I was tagged in during my school’s homecoming football game. My overall question is, should I adjust anything to my social media pages, knowing that some schools do indeed view them?
Swearing is not outrageous in society anymore, unless you’re applying to some ultra religious colleges, and I doubt that’s the case, plus you have Twitter set to private anyway, so that should be fine. Sounds like you don’t need to change a thing. However, I would recommend taking the actions below.
Set your Facebook profile to private, so people don’t make assumptions about why it’s empty as you describe it. No matter what is in a Facebook profile, someone can use the information to make assumptions and pigeon-hole someone into a stereotype. You can set your friends list to private.
You should also search your name on Google. Search it in quotation marks, like “John Smith” or “Jane Doe” or whatever, and see what comes up. For my daughter who’s in college, I can tell you that several pages of links come up that include the most unexpected things dating all the way back to 6th grade – including things her schools ran in e-newsletters, class assignments, etc. Always a good idea to know what other people might be viewing about you (and also whether someone else has the same name with negative things out there that could be confused for you).
It’s great you are thinking about your public online image at this stage in life. This is something that too few students take charge of, but you can do a lot to work it in your favor. If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile already, consider setting one up with the best things you want to say about yourself. That profile is your online resume, and is used heavily in recruiting. You can add to it throughout college as you complete courses and internships. What’s more, you can add all the new connections you make that could pay off down the road.
If you are creative and have a portfolio of your work (art, photography, writing, etc.), you might want to check out the many of the options out there for creating an online portfolio, so it’s ready to share with someone when you need it.