Personal and Professional: Controlling Your Online Image Through Social Media

Social media has great benefits for both personal and professional use. It can be used to maintain friendships and relationships, and to share details of your life with those in your social circles. It also provides opportunities for networking and connecting with peers and leaders who you might otherwise not encounter physically, and can give you a platform to share your expertise. Whether your experience is as a marketer or lawyer, a firefighter or a librarian, social media can give you a way to show off your knowledge and skills.

MyLife extends a helping hand and gives users full insight into how others might view them online through a unique Reputation Score, and can even aid them in taking initial action to correct their online reputations if need be. While MyLife is intent on helping individuals dive headfirst into the process, it is the person themselves who will need to take the necessary steps needed.

Of course, there is a fairly big difference in how a person wants to look for personal or professional connections. Since social media represents a large portion of how a person looks online, it’s important that people consider the balance between personal versus professional in their profiles. With that in mind, there are two main ways to approach controlling your online image through social media.

Managing two separate accounts

Many feel that this is the simplest solution: to entirely separate one’s content between personal and professional, and there are certainly benefits to this approach. For instance, the general “audience” of your content may be drastically different when posting personally or professionally. Your friends won’t necessarily care about the latest developments in your industry, and your peers might not be all that interested in where you went last weekend. By having separate accounts, you can give both parts of yourself equal focus and direct content to the appropriate audiences. Of course, having multiple accounts can end up becoming a lot of work, meaning that you’ll have to be on top of posting and updating multiple profiles regularly.

Managing a merged profile

Maintaining a single profile that balances personal and professional posting is not only more convenient than handling multiple accounts, but if done properly, can provide a truly well-rounded identity that both your friends and professional peers can find appealing. Of course, the downside of this means greater self-regulation of your content, both in personal and professional regards. Or in some cases, you can channel specific posts and messages to certain groups within your contacts and connections, ensuring that each post reaches the specific people that you want to see them.

Ultimately, it’s important to be aware that no matter what the situation, you should always be cautious when posting things online. Even with privacy settings on personal accounts to help protect your content from being seen by unwanted eyes, you never know what might slip through the cracks. This is why MyLife is so dedicated to providing our own Reputation Scores and reports to continually give you a greater understanding of your online image and how to control it.

When it comes to social media, determining the best method for you in managing your personal and professional personas will allow you to have more control over your reputation as a whole.