Summaries02.20.2013 | Christie Melby
While social media platforms continue to grow and increase in popularity for both companies and individuals, Facebook generally caters to users’ personal lives. Because the platform is typically personal, Facebook profiles have become notorious for preventing opportunities and leaving bad impressions due to inappropriate content and/or pictures.
If you are my age (early 20s) and just finishing college, you have heard a horror story or two about someone’s inappropriate Facebook being mentioned during a job interview. However, if you properly maintain your Facebook profile, it can provide networking opportunities and add credibility to your personal brand. The trick is making sure your profile is ready for any type of scrutiny.
How can you go about maintaining and revising your profile’s content so that you’d be happy with anyone seeing it? This isn’t typically an easy undertaking. Facebook’s constantly changing privacy settings can make it difficult and tedious to control who sees what you’ve posted and monitor everything that’s on your profile. Historically, the only way to clean up a Facebook profile has been deleting and beginning anew, or doing a substantial amount of searching through your history to remove unseemly items. Neither of these “solutions” is ideal; I don’t want to delete my Facebook and lose all of the content that’s on there, but I also don’t want to sift through my status updates from 2006.
But there’s hope. I’m excited to share a new app that provides a much more convenient remedy for cleaning up your Facebook profile as you work on your personal brand.
SimpleWash allows you to search text on your Facebook profile, including comments, posts and photo captions, and lets you edit them accordingly. If you ever posted a joke to your friend’s page that you would feel uncomfortable sharing with your boss, SimpleWash will assist you in finding it and erasing it.
Targeted to recent college graduates that will be entering the professional world, the creators wanted to provide a way for people to clean up their profiles and make them presentable. After being named App of the Week by ABCNews.com, David Steinberg, one of the creators, said, “We wanted to give [Facebook] users a choice to control what potential employers might see.” After using SimpleWash, I can feel comfortable with the content currently on my Facebook profile, and I have an understanding of everything that’s on it.
Here at CPR, we are strong believers in making social media work for you. Employers look to Facebook as a reflection of your online brand. Therefore, your Facebook is part of your online brand, and it is important that the comments you have made and photos you are in match your ideal public persona.
Facebook profiles have the potential to be useful networking and branding tools, if used correctly. After all, Facebook reached 1 billion users in 2012 – that’s a lot of potential connections. However, if you created your Facebook page before you embarked on your career, or never thought through connecting personal and professional profiles, there is likely content that could misrepresent the professional persona you’re hoping to create. Working with SimpleWash is a time effective way to deal with this common issue.
Tags: Facebook, Facebook 1 billion, Facebook how to delete account, Facebook how to delete group, Facebook how to delete likes, Facebook privacy, Facebook profile, how to clean up facebook, how to clean up your facebook, SimpleWash, Social media
