How to Rebrand Your Social Media Presence in One Afternoon

If you’ve recently graduated or are in the market for a job you may consider maturing your social media presence. Is it one you wouldn’t be afraid to broadcast to the world? The last thing you want is for someone to search the internet for you and find something that would hurt your image or cred­i­bil­ity. Depending on how long you’ve been involved with social networks, the cleaning up and revamping of your online presence may look to be a daunting task, but may easily be accom­plished in one afternoon.

Start where everyone else does – search for yourself. Type your name and any keywords that might be asso­ci­ated with you in some of the top search engines on the web – note what you see and which sites have your infor­ma­tion. Don’t forget to utilize image search as well.

Trim the fat. – Take one social network at a time and delete old posts, photos, updates, and friend connections/followers that are irrel­e­vant to the ‘new’ you. If you no longer use the account itself, it may be best to delete it. For Facebook — back up any old photos and updates you wish to keep, but are unsure of sharing, then delete the unwanted infor­ma­tion. For Twitter — it may be best to start with a clean slate — creating a separate personal account and another for pro­fes­sional interactions.

Update, update, update — Make sure all usernames have been upgraded to something with your name, or a unique cor­re­la­tion to you. Aside from changing your usernames, also make sure all contact info, job descrip­tions, and links are up-to-date and cohesive. For example, accounts should use the same (or a similar) appro­pri­ate photo of yourself.

Connect your accounts. Once you have your Facebook and Twitter profiles up to professional-par, utilize LinkedIn, and other networks such as Pinterest, Google+ and Klout, by con­nect­ing all of your accounts together. This not only helps people find you, it adds to your credibility.

Begin posting. Whether you have pre-existing content, or you are starting from scratch, it’s important to build infor­ma­tion to share. If you’re stuck for ideas, try checking out what similar pro­fes­sion­als tweet, link, and blog about drawing inspi­ra­tion from those places. Net­work­ing comes naturally when you have content to engage users. Make sure your infor­ma­tion is appro­pri­ate for your target audience, and doesn’t include con­tro­ver­sial subjects.

Network & Engage. While the major social networks are a great place to interact with others, it may also be ben­e­fi­cial to build up your profile on one of the many social networks specific to your industry. While LinkedIn and Google+ are ranked after Facebook and Twitter in terms of active users, they can be critical for SEO and will help others find you via search. Regard­less of whom you’re looking to connect with, there are many industry-specific social networks available to join.

Live long and prosper. Aside from keeping your social media presence updated, take it a step further and conduct a friend up, attend a con­fer­ence, or begin a blog.

An afternoon well spent. Taking a little time to update and rebrand your social media image could be the dif­fer­ence between you and other can­di­dates for jobs, pro­mo­tions, speaking engage­ments etc. With appro­pri­ately updated social media accounts, you can relax knowing that your online presence is one you can proudly broadcast to the world.