3 Ways Social Media Can Ruin Your Career

I read an interesting article on the internet today about the negative side effects of social media. First off, joining a social media network can be helpful to starting your career, but as we shall see it can be detrimental as well. When done right and maintained properly, social media can enhance your career; but one false move and it can come back to haunt you in the future. Here are a few social media moves you should think twice about doing: 1.) Being too opinionated; 2.) Allowing photos of yourself to be posted or tagged; and 3.) Using foul or inappropriate language.

If you are voicing a strong opinion, you might want to be careful about how free your speech is, especially in regard to the following topics: religion, politics, race and employers. When talking about religion or politics, you have your own values that you strongly believe in and are proud of, but there's no need to attack someone else's. The same goes for complaining about employers while you are still under their employment. A future employer might stumble across your profile, read comments from months or even years ago, and decide you are not a suitable. The article provided an example, in which someone updated their status on Facebook to “bored at work.”  The final result, her boss saw the post and she was fired.

The best line of defense with regards to photographs is to not have any questionable photographs taken at all. The article provided an example of a teacher posting photographs on Facebook from a trip to Paris. There was alcohol in her picture and guess what? She was fired for it.

With regards to using foul or inappropriate language, just keep it clean and you will have nothing to worry about. There is always an element of risk when posting online, especially under your social media profiles because you can't always control who is going to be reading or watching it. If nothing else, familiarize yourself with privacy settings and keep in mind that the internet remembers everything.