Have You Searched Yourself on Google Recently? You may want to.

 I never really thought about the aftermath of what I post on social media until I got to college and started thinking about my future. I don’t think I post that much about myself online so I’ve never been concerned about what employers would find, but have you ever sat down and searched your name to see what pops up? Most people are like me and don’t think to search their own names on the internet to see what could be seen by employers or potential customers. 

Google Search

The process of reassessing your personal brand online is easy to do. You can start by making all your public social media profiles private, hiding them from search. Another tip that I learned from the reading is to deactivate all accounts that you haven’t used in a while. Content from those accounts may not be something you want your future self to be perceived as. You can also go through your accounts you use now and delete unprofessional content from them, but if you don’t want those memories deleted, you can also create a whole new professional account that you use for business and make that public while keeping your personal one private. 

Google Images will unfortunately not allow you to remove tagged photos that have been uploaded by someone else, but you are able to start uploading and tagging yourself in photos that you feel are professional and will look good on your personal accounts. One last tip that I read about was that you can also set up Google alert with your name to monitor and regulate mentions of your name on the internet. This can help to alert you to publish more professional photos of yourself to your account and also show you who is posting certain photos of you so you can talk with them to possibly watch what they post. 

Hopefully some of these tips and tricks were as insightful to you as they were to me! I’m now going to be focusing more on what I post online and how what I post could be perceived to employers.