Improving your Online Reputation
In the past 5+ years, I have spent a lot of time managing my online profiles and social media. My goal had been to keep things professional while being able to show some creative flair. It also helps standing out in search results and showcasing my work to the Internet world.
So why bother with online presence? Career Attraction has a wonderful post about How to Survive Being Googled by Potential Employers. They mention:
A 2013 nationwide survey of hiring managers and HR professionals conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of CareerBuilder found that 39% of employers use social networking sites to research job candidates.
If you’re a designer, Inside Designmodo created a helpful guide about Personal Branding.
Here are some of my tips and useful websites I found that will help your online reputation.
General Tips
- Always keep in mind the privacy settings and audience when commenting, posting, or writing something about yourself. How do you want to be perceived? To stay professional, avoid sharing intimate details about your life and try to have a positive tone. No one wants to higher a negative Nancy.
- Think about your experience with social media news feeds. Do you find yourself annoyed when scrolling through dozens of a single person’s update? Avoid spamming your audience with information. Try to spread information out by scheduling your posts. I’ve used Buffer’s free services, but Hootsuite is also a well-known service.
- Use exciting, descriptive words when posting. And make use of hashtags so people can find your content more easily. Not everyone is willing to click a link without seeing some context first.
- Keep content up-to-date and relevant. Someone will probably ask you a question about what you’ve written, so write things that you can talk about! Also spend the 5 minutes to update your profile to your cool new job, rather than updating a year later when you may have quit.
- Delete unused social media profile (either us a poster or follower). Inactive profiles will be a negative for you.
Social Media Profiles
The Guardian and Social Media Explorer share which social media profiles and apps help boost your online reputation.
The best professional profiles to share content for the Internet world are Google+ and LinkedIn. Twitter can also be used to frequently publish quotes and take notes during events & conferences.
I believe Facebook should be a private & personal profile, but Instagram is a great way to highlight your life in stylish photographs. Snapchat and Pinterest is also a great way to share your life and interests.
You can also showcase artistic or photographic work on websites such as DeviantART, Flickr, or 500px.
If you’re a designer, Dribbble is a great way to showcase your skills and Behance is a great venue to explain your work & process.
As a developer, you should also use Github or Bitbucket. To showcase skills, you can also use CodePen or JSFiddle.
If you like to write, I highly recommend participating in, or creating a blog. It’s a lot of fun and helps you become articulate with words (this can also help you with presenting). You can use Tumblr, Wordpress, or even Medium.
I also recommend Meetup to all of my colleagues looking for jobs. There are also a lot of networks to connect different professions (e.g. UXPA) or groups of people (e.g. AWSN, Systers).
Joining groups allow you to network, learn about topics, and find like-minded people. If you have a lot of knowledge, or are looking for honest answers, join Quora. It’s like /r/askreddit with less trolls!
Profile Pages
On top of keeping up-to-date with what your colleagues are doing, make sure you have at least one profile to share your information. If you don’t have the resources to create your own website, use other guides like @hackingui’s Making a Website blog series. You can also use WYSIWYG editors like Squarespace or Strikingly.
Creating a profile makes you more approachable on the net. At the very least, fill in relevant details on your social profiles. You will increase your online presence and opportunities for people to connect. Try to link your account to your profiles to increase your reach as well.
Creating a profile makes you more approachable on the net
These are some services I recommend:
- Gravatar: an avatar that represents you online, I’m currently using it for my Wordpress profile.
- About.me: a website that cleverly integrates in its TLD, and allows you to create a homepage.
- BrandYourself: an online reputation manager that affects the results of your Google search. It’s a great way to showcase your many different profiles!
Control Your Brand
With so many social media profiles, how does one keep track of everything? To ensure my online presence is where I want it to be, I use Trello to list out my profiles, relevant links, and tasks of what I need to do (e.g. add a new profile to display, upload pictures on my profile, etc.)
I also do a search for my name and usernames on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo or Persona and services like namechk.
Google also has a guide on managing your online reputation. If there is a page you would like to hide, try requesting Content Removal on Google’s Webmaster Tools page. More information regarding removal policies on Google can be found here and here. You can also be alerted for new search results on Google Alerts.
Keep content up-to-date and relevant…delete unused social media profiles
Other people or companies may feature you on their websites. If the information is outdated or you’d prefer not be to be featured, you can always ask them to modify or remove it.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that you can try to control your online presence the best you can. Create profiles and content that you want other people to see.
…you can try to control your online presence the best you can
Whether you want people to find and contact you about opportunities, an easy way to showcase your skills and experiences, or just an excuse to talk about yourself, online branding is worth investing in.
Please let me know what you think about online presence in the comments below. Feel free to follow me on major social media channels @misscarriemah
Note: This was originally posted on my website a few years ago, and has since been edited to include additional social media profiles. For related posts, I wrote Social media and your professional profile and Tips and resources on improving online reputation on Youth Are Awesome.
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