10/23/16 – The Social Media Audit

The articles that we read got me thinking about my social media usage even though I’m not super active on social media. I think the idea of a social media brand is a concept about someone’s perception about a user on different platforms of social media. My social media presence isn’t very active although I do like pictures constantly and sometimes comment on a couple of friend’s posts. I went through the different steps that each of the websites asked you to go through. I ended up changing a couple of things about my social media usage. For example, I googled myself and found pictures of me from 5th grade which was interesting. None of the things that popped up, one of them being a link to my posts on this sit, bothered me enough to want to delete them. I found a couple of things that showed random movie industries like the Hunger Games whose pages I had liked popped up which I went back and unliked because all of it was from middle school and my freshman year of high school. I also untagged myself from some embarrassing Instagram and facebook pictures because they were just weird and from a while ago.

It was interesting looking through all my old posts and I also made it a point to delete all my posts from my first few years of high school because that was when I used to post weird status updates and cliché quotes. I got rid of any posts that I had shared about anything controversial or political to remain as unbiased as possible on the internet. I read a while ago that many employers and colleges monitor their potential candidates’ social media presence and I didn’t want any posts I had made to affect a potential employer’s perception of me.

I don’t think that I have a “personal brand” but I do think that if someone does come to having it, it should be maintained because it really does showcase a person’s perception to the entire world which can affect a lot of things in that person’s life.

Overall, going through all my social media helped me to refresh through my content and clean it up to make it more presentable. It was also an eye-opener to how my presence on social media has changed since freshman year of high school, four years. I’m glad I had the option to do it because I don’t think I would’ve done it for a long time had I not gone through the articles and even this assignment.