Why you need to think about your online reputation

3.2 billion people use the internet. Everyone is online now. That’s where we spend most of our time. Scrolling, uploading, downloading, streaming… these aspects of life have taken precedence and take up our daily life. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat are all funnels for us to broadcast ourselves online to a limitless audience. This is great for exposure, getting yourself out there and showing the world who you are. But the internet is still figuring itself out.  It changes in the blink of an eye. The internet from 1995 compared with the internet of 2017 is a wholly different place. So you can see that we’re still figuring it out too. Who knows where it will be in 2026?

Why should I care?

However, despite the incredible changes that the internet brings, being able to show who you are to everyone has real life consequences. What you put online can and will influence the opinion of others. That means your online reputation can affect your job prospects and can make the difference between winning an opportunity and losing one. After all, what you publish online becomes public information.  So in order to have a smart strategy it is vital to know what exactly you’re putting online in order to present the best version of yourself.

A few basics to start

A few handy tips to start off your online reputation journey include:

Tidy! If you see something online that you dislike or is inappropriate, try and get it removed.

Get private. Most social media websites privacy settings have public as default. Simply update your preferences to hide anything you want to hide.

Clean. Old pictures of a time gone by? Simply remove them or put them on private.

Now that’s complete your online reputation is probably in a better situation than it was before.

But I still need help!

There is much more to your online reputation than the few simple steps above. That is why we created the A Quick Guide To Manage Your Online Reputation. Our guide will take you through social media, why it’s important, why you need to maintain and curate your social media presence as well as what benefits this will bring. So now there’s no reason not to have a positive, online presence. Let’s get to it.