Social Media Marketing – Do You Have Privacy Concerns Using Social Media?

I have a niece with a Facebook account, and I don’t know how many times I have said to her that it’s really not appropriate to post party pictures or have her friends post party pictures on her wall that are not putting her in the best light possible. I have mentioned this a number of times and, yet, she continues to allow her friends and she herself post pictures of her at drunken parties. This will hurt her in the future, and it will hurt her in the future because more and more people are going to social media in order to find out just who you are.

You have the ability to set your privacy in all of the different social media platforms. Facebook has an enormous amount of options for privacy. You can have your Facebook be wide open or you can have it locked down tight so hardly anyone can get to see it. That is your choice. But everyone needs to take a look at what they are comfortable with, what they want out there and, yes, okay sometimes there will be a blunder. We’re all human!

Maybe you’ll be in a bad mood one day and post something inappropriate on your wall or you will allow friends to post on your wall. We’re all human. The thing you want to make sure is that that’s not consistently on your wall. If it’s a one of thing that happens very rarely, that’s not going to be considered your normal behavior, but if all you have in any of your social media, whether it be videos, Twitter or Facebook, then that’s going to demonstrate to people that that’s the type of person that you are.

You don’t want anything on any of your social media profiles that you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see, and that includes what your friends are saying. If you have friends or followers who come back and comment or retweet things that are not so nice or they swear, use vulgar language, inappropriate language, you want to ask them to stop doing that. And if they don’t stop doing that, you want to block them.

All of the different platforms will allow you to block friends, followers, and or comments. They all have some tool to allow you to block. It is your responsibility to check and see that your privacy settings on each and every one of the platforms is to your liking that fits your reason for being on the social media platforms.

Recently, in my job, we discovered that one of the senior managers was using Facebook while she was at meetings. She didn’t know how to set the privacy settings on her Facebook wall, and everyone could see everything. Everyone could tell that she was playing games on her BlackBerry while she should have been paying attention in a meeting. That could be reason enough for her to lose her job.

Make sure you set your privacy settings exactly where you need them to be. It really is worth the time and effort to check out the privacy settings on each and every one of your social media accounts.