Pit Falls of Social Media

Yahoo! Finance posted this fantastic article on the Financial Dangers of Social Media. We encourage you to click on the link to read the entire article, but below is the section about employment. However, there is a lot of great additional information on Debt Collection and Scams and ways to protect yourself.

Employment

Andy Beal, CEO of the social media monitoring platform Trackur.com, says jobseekers should assume potential employers will do a Google search of candidates' names. Social media profiles typically appear near the top of the search page.

If you have questionable pictures or posts on a public profile, take them down or make the profile private to avoid trouble.

Also, steer clear of negative talk about a prospective employer on any social media platform, Beal says. Many companies monitor mentions of their brand throughout the Web, he says.

He cites the case of a Twitter user who posted about a new job offer from Cisco, but expressed doubt about "the daily commute" and "hating the work." A Cisco employee noticed the tweet and demanded to know the name of the user's hiring manager.

Even employees who think their jobs are safe can sabotage themselves by being too honest online about their personal lives, or by posting feelings regarding a boss, client, co-worker or company for whom they work.

"We've seen a lot of cases of people publishing status updates that have gotten them in trouble," says Justin Smith, founder and editor in chief of Inside Facebook. "People have said things that have caused problems with their boss because of what they said about their work or because they've shared some other kind of private information about work online."

Caroline McCarthy, a staff writer at CNET News, says the best defense against such mistakes is to use plain old common sense. Remember, anything that appears on the Web is just a screenshot away from spreading quickly, despite the best efforts of social media users to keep it private.