If business is part of your everyday life, whether working for yourself or a company, it is essential that your social profiles have a strong online presence, and that your social media handles represent your company’s interests entirely.
However, with the ever-accelerating advancements in social media, it is not just your company’s online profiles that need to be monitored, the same precautions should be taken when posting and sharing on your personal platforms.
If you’re someone that thinks that it’s only friends and family that view your online profiles, you are almost certainly wrong. Business partners, customers, and potential employers wouldn’t think twice about using your social media platforms as a kind of screening process before starting a business with you. Whether it be a picture, a shared video, or even just the liking of a page. If it’s a topic or image that doesn’t align with a company’s interests, either one of those examples could be a potential problem when it comes to future business ventures.
So how do you combat this? It could be as simple as securing your online profiles so only close friends and family can see your posts, preventing outsiders from seeing your online persona. However, this very notion might also prevent future business, by simply not being able to discover anything about you, companies may choose to look the other way.
The best solution is to display a fine balance between your personal and professional interests. By creating a certain amount of fluidity between the two, it is immediately apparent to anyone viewing your profile that you are a business-driven individual, and whilst it is part of your everyday life, it is not just your job, but also perhaps a hobby. In addition to that, you should share posts with caution, avoiding politics and religious posts like the plague, and it might be a good idea to change your Ibiza picture album to private.
Guest blog by George Sargent