Sponsored by LowestRates.ca:
Social media is one of the greatest stories of the past decade. Ten years ago, most of us were not on Facebook. Today, you might not know a person who doesn’t use Mark Zuckerberg’s world-conquering platform. With so many large and up-and-coming social media sources taking up more and more of our time, it’s inevitable that social media users will find their personal sites colliding with business colleagues, employees, and employers.
When a corner of your social media that you might not be proud of is accessed by someone you work with or work for, this can be embarrassing at best, or a threat to your job at worst! Don’t let social media kill your personal finance budget. Here are some ways to prevent your personal social media life from mixing unduly with your business life, without having to pull the plug.
Know How to Use Privacy Settings
If you’ve been using Facebook for more than a few years, there are probably pictures of you that you wouldn’t want just anyone to see. It’s important to know how to carefully restrict access to these images and to take the time to actually do so. It’s easy to set posts of your own to private or to be viewed only by a specific subset of your larger friend group. If other people have posted pictures of you, you can do your best to un-tag yourself, or at least request that the other person do so. If you are diligent about privacy from the beginning, it’s unlikely that a social media event will come to haunt you at work.
Know Who is Watching
There are some social media representations of yourself which can and should be accessible to strangers (and as might happen, colleagues), so it’s important to think carefully about what appears here. If you have a Tinder account, you should be conscious about the way you “advertise” yourself in words and image, assuming that anyone in the world could be watching. Of course, when you connect with an individual you don’t work with on a platform like this, feel free to act as you please.
Find a Balance of Caution and Being Yourself
Some people find a comfortable place for social media in their personal life, but not in their private life. Some people use variations of their names to keep in touch with family and friends without being easily accessible to others. Other people feel more comfortable “letting it all hang out” on social media (even as a career person) simply because this seems to work in today’s day and age. We should always think before we post anything on social media, but in many cases people will likely care much less than you’d think. Still, do be careful.
Social media is a juggernaut that isn’t going to disappear from our lives ever again. It can be nerve-wracking, however, for a career person to balance a private life with a fulfilling social media life. Only you can determine the right balance, and sometimes, extra care must be taken to partition certain aspects of your identity from the people you work with.
