How to Improve Your Facebook Profile: Play it Smart With Friends and Potential Employers
Think LinkedIn is the only social network that potential employers use to find and judge you? Wrong. Here's how to improve your Facebook profile to be more considerate to your friends, plus play it safe and smart with present and future work colleagues.
On your Facebook page, your friends (even the ones you adore) can be the biggest wild card. In particular, Dixson says to watch for wall posts with inside jokes that someone on your friend list might find offensive.
One way to monitor this: keep yourself updated on key actions that happen on your profile so you can react to them in real-time. Since many of us keep e-mail in our pocket, you can set up e-mail notifications to let you know that someone has commented on your wall or status, or tagged you in a photo from Saturday night. Often, these e-mails include what was said. So if something looks like it doesn't belong, you know to quickly log into Facebook and delete it.
(To set these notifications, go to the "settings" link in the upper right hand corner of your homepage, click on "account settings," and click on the "Notifications" tab).
However you decide to regulate your profile information, Hardey says, it's a work in progress for all of us and, again, remember the power of your privacy settings.
"We are still coming to terms with how to control our own social information," she says. "So the addressing of privacy is in the power of the many, but only on the radar of the few. Which is why this continues to be such a popular topic for my blog."
