Lily Snyder

I few years ago I, like many of you, searched my name online. I was mortified to find out that Live Journal from when I was in high school was still activated and public. I had never gone in shut it down.

The longer we’re online the more social media debt we have. I’m borrowing from a term used in software development, “technical debt” where quick and easily deployed code today which means updating (refactoring) the code later so it fits in with the overall code. That’s what we’re going to today, refactor our social media accounts.

Today’s Assignment: Clean Up Your Social Media

Do you know how many social media accounts you have? You may be like me and have some open from years ago that you forgot about. You also may have some that you like using but perhaps they shouldn’t be under your actual name.

1. Make a list of all your known social media accounts.
2. Search your name to see if any more come up that you forgot about. If you ever changed your name (if you got married for instance) then search your maiden name too. If you have a blog name that is clearly linked to you, like Lilyotron is for me, then search that as well.
3. Use multiple search engines. I get different results across Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
4. Decide which social media accounts you want to keep, deactivate, or no longer be linked to your name.

Doing this exercise has the added benefit of finding out which of your social media appear on different search engines. I was surprised to find out that my Minds.com account was the 4th one to show up on Bing. I created it but don’t post much there. However, now I know it shows up on the first search page it might be good to post to there for people who are interested in the blog.

Watch

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