I was not surprised to learn that potential employers are looking at your social media sites, and very little on Dani Fankhauser’s Job Seekers: Beware of these Social Media Traps came as a shocking surprise.
We all know pornography, drinking and drugs on FB is a huge mistake. What most people forget, on FB and other social media such as Blogs, is that grammar counts. And the cost may mean a job.
How difficult is it to use spell/gram check? Granted, FB doesn’t have spell/gram check, but if you aren’t sure, take a minute and type it into Word–or look up a word in the dictionary (shocking, I know).
And let’s not forget twitter and linked-in. Because of their very nature, these social media tools require brief, almost terse, communications. We have to be vigilant to fight our tendencies to descend into text speak because it matters.
Privacy controls, you ask? Please, do we really need a reminder that anything you publish on the web is fair game? Here it is: If your mother can’t read it, you need to think twice before you hit send or publish.
Take a few minutes, today–not tomorrow, and review your posts on FB and Twitter. Are they grammatically correct? Are they clean? If not, now would be a great time to engage the delete function!
How many of you found something on Fankhauser’s list? How often did you engage in deleting practices? And should we let lists like this determine what is, for the most part, our personal walls?
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