Attention freshmen: now’s the time to start cleaning up your social media!

If you’re pursuing a degree in media and communications, it’s important to hold yourself accountable for what you are posting. You can’t expect to be trusted with a company’s social media account if the business doesn’t think you can control what you’re posting on your own. Social media is a window to a person’s character, and it doesn’t make you look professional if it’s full of curse words and party pictures. Poor self-censoring on social media can hurt your credibility because employers won’t take you seriously.

To start this “cleanse” start by going through your social media accounts that you’ve had since middle school, and go ahead and delete those awkward photos that if someone were to actually discover it, it would haunt you forever. Maybe there’s someone on Twitter that influences you to post negatively - might as well unfollow them so you aren’t swayed by their posting habits. Most importantly, delete your posts that have profanity or pictures of you partying it up.

Now that you’ve removed the negative, it’s crucial that you maintain this mindset. Be mindful of who you retweet; they might have content on their timeline that you don’t agree with or create a negative opinion about you. On Facebook, make sure you are ok with what people tag you in or pictures they post of you. Also, remember that if you like a page’s post on Facebook, it shows up on your friends’ newsfeed. My biggest piece of advice for keeping a clean social media presence is think before you post. If you're angry about a grade or your teacher, or if you want to voice an opinion on something, keep in mind who your audience is and what you want them to think of you.

I know that people say what’s on the Internet is there forever, but it can help to make an effort and show you are actively trying to prepare your social media presence for when you take on your career. If you don’t keep yourself accountable for what you post, don’t be surprised if you have a harder time getting an internship.