Don’t be a Twit, stay social media-savvy

Ah, how the world has changed. It wasn’t so long ago that, if you were applying for a job, the most you had to do beyond researching the role and tidying up your CV was to make sure your shoes were clean, your hair was tidy and there were no stray bogies hanging around your face on the day of the interview (if you got that far).

These days however, there’s more to keep clean than your face if you’re after that dream job. Once they’ve received your CV and covering letter, any potential employer worth their salt will be checking out your Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook page before you can say ‘un-tag’.

In this digitally-savvy age, you’d think we’d all have got the message by now that what we say online can stay with us forever. And most people have, to a certain extent. Being a ‘professional’ social networking site, LinkedIn tends to be used for its intended purpose: to make yourself sound like you do more than you really do and you know more than you really know. There aren’t too many hilarious videos of dogs chasing deer knocking about on LinkedIn to date.

Most of us are hopefully clued up about privacy settings on Facebook these days too, although the regular changes mean you might want to just double check that potential bosses can’t see that picture of you drinking vodka out of someone’s belly button in Ibiza last summer.

Twitter however, seems to continue to cause problems for celebs and us plebs alike with its instant, quick and fast-flowing nature. It’s all very well deleting that ill-thought out tweet about your boss’s bad breath or your mate’s ugly boyfriend, but if someone’s screen-grabbed it, you’re stuffed. And don’t even get me started on tweeting unsavoury images…  You can see a snap below that Russell Brand kindly tweeted of his (soon to be ex) wife Katy Perry looking less than her usual polished self, before swiftly deleting it. And you can have a gander at some of the tweets that people probably wish they hadn’t sent.

The point is, unless you have protected your tweets, Twitter is public (one of its biggest appeals is that you don’t have to be ‘friends’ with Bill Gates, Lady Gaga or  Barry Chuckle to hear their thoughts on world peace or to find out what they’ve had for tea ). So make sure you’re happy for anyone to read everything you say. (You can of course keep your Twitter anonymous but this is harder to maintain than you might think.)

This is even more important if you’re applying for a job in social media, digital marketing, online PR and so on. If you look like you’re getting your own PR and social media wrong, how can you be trusted to get anyone else’s right?