My Name is Karen Espinola and My Social Media Does Not Define Me.
No, I’m not going to justify using social media the same way we did in 2007. U R b3tt3r +h@n +h@+.
Over the last few years I have constantly heard that employers are constantly looking at your social media. It frightened me so much that I feared for the sake of the tweets I posted as a 15 year old fangirl and the constant angry capitalized tweets while watching a Manchester United game.
Then, instead of tweeting about what I was passionate about (One Direction and soccer, lol), I found my tweets becoming very standard and basic and didn’t really reflect my personality. But I did find that my brand was developing to match my job and volunteer work. A lot of what I tweet about now is Ryerson specific, as I currently work for Ryerson Student Life Programs. My tweets are promoting events, reflecting on what Student Affairs professionals tweet, and doing my best to incorporate GIFs because I learned that images on tweets garner more views. By typing that, I realize how lame that sounds but it’s how it is these days.
Have you ever Google’d yourself? What comes up when you Google your name?
My name is Karen Espinola, and apparently it is a very common name in South America (I’m a first gen Canadian to Portuguese descent for context). This is evident by a simple Google search.
When I search my name on Google, the first page of results only garners 1 link that is actually about me (pictures were blocked out because none of them were me):
When I search my name with the word Toronto next to it, there’s a few more results.
When I search my name with the word Ryerson next to it, there is a better understanding of what I have done over the last four years in university.
If a job employer was to just Google my name, they couldn’t really get a good sense of me because most of the links have nothing to do with me. I’m just thankful that in every search, my LinkedIn comes up first!
It’s strange to know that based on different Google searches, you are able to find different personas of me. But these are searches that I would make, it would be interesting to know what employers would search exactly to find information about me. Unfortunately, because of the 100’s of Karen Espinolas in South America, I don’t actually have a single social media that is just my name. There is not real way for me to maintain a consistent brand because every name I try to use is taken. Hopefully one day my work will matter enough for my Google search to be filled with links of all the great work I have done and will continue to do.
But if social media really mattered for getting a job, how did Donald Trump manage to get the most important job in America? ;)
