If someone is trying to harass or discredit you online, your social media profiles will be the first places they go. Keeping your personal and professional accounts completely separate helps to limit their reach, and prevents potentially damaging circumstances in your personal life becoming associated with your business or professional reputation. If your name and face are part of your brand, using a middle name or pseudonym can help keep your personal profile out of the spotlight.
But what if your privacy has already been breached, how do you fix the issue?
By default, most social media profiles are completely open to the public by default, letting anyone look through every post and photo you have uploaded, which could go all the way back to when you were in college or even in school. Set everything on your profile to be visible to friends only, or even just you if there is a chance someone within your network is leaking information. Social media privacy settings are a vital tool in protecting yourself online.
Next, it is time to purge your old posts. You might have just prevented the average internet user from accessing your profile, but anyone on your friends list can still just take a screenshot of anything on your page. This could be very time-consuming, as you might need to go through years of posts and photos to make sure there is nothing online that could be damaging. Put simply, if you don’t want something to be made public, deleting it entirely is by far the safest option.
The average person in the UK has more than 500 friends on social media, but only actually knows a small fraction of that. If you have a habit of adding people you don’t really know, now is the time to break it. There is no use making your profile private if the people violating your privacy are on your friends list. In fact, now might also be a great time to start unfriending some of those strangers. ReputationDefender’s online reputation specialists are experts at protecting your digital privacy in a crisis.
If your online privacy is under attack, get in contact by calling +44 800 131 0700, or emailing hello@reputationdefender.com to find out how we can help, or follow us on Twitter for more tips on protecting your online reputation.
