Facebook made its first appearance when I was a junior in
college, when you still had to have an email address from a school that had
registered to be on Facebook in order to be active on the social media site. I
guess it offered us an incorrect complacency since my friends and I naively
presumed that the guideline of needing to have a college e-mail address to be
on Facebook would assist to keep a great deal of the creeps off of the website.
I don't believe I thought much about personal privacy at the
time. Facebook was really the very first social media website that I had any
interaction with, so I didn't truly consider who might see my profile and the
pictures that I shared. During my first main date with my husband,
nevertheless, he believed he slyly worked a few things he had seen on my
Facebook profile into the conversation. This was still throughout the early
Facebook days, and this was probably the first time that I recognized how
public your Facebook profile actually is.
As time went on, Facebook started letting anyone and
everybody have an account, and it ended up being far more than simply a college
social networking website. I still remember my daddy sending me a Facebook good
friend demand and how odd I believed it was at the time to envision my parents
communicating on social media. Funny enough, my friends and I find that our
moms and dads (55+ audience) are now the most active on Facebook. In fact, as
of January 2014, the 55+ group on Facebook consisted of around 28 million users,
making it the fastest growing demographic on the social media website. At this
point, you probably shouldn't put anything online that you wouldn't desire your
parents, co-workers or kids to see.
When I started operating in Corporate America, I contributed
in helping to work with student’s right out of college for my former company's
Management Development Program. Can you guess what one of our tools was to
speak with candidates? That's right. Facebook. Remarkably, much of our
prospects at the time had actually not benefited from Facebook's privacy
functions, so images of all of their late night celebration shenanigans were
available to the general public. Yes, I think I was one of those weird Facebook
stalkers that took a look at profiles of people I had never even satisfied in
the past, and yes, specific images certainly decreased an individual’s
possibilities of landing a task. That being said, you need to double check your
privacy settings prior to you obtain a new job, and keep anything somewhat non
professional personal while you are employed.
As a business owner, I also suggest you constantly keep your
Facebook privacy settings in mind. While you desire your brand's Facebook
profile available for all of the general public to see it, your individual life
should remain personal. Too many intimate personal details might affect how
your audience connects with your brand on social media, particularly if they
touch on controversial issues.
