Teens: Watch Your Social Media Presence

twitter logo map 09 (Photo credit: The Next Web)

“Treat every conversation you have on Twitter or Facebook as if it were a nationally televised press conference.”

This advice is not a recommendation from a public relations firm, or from a head hunter, or from a corporate policy book on social media. Nor was it taken from a how-to book on political life.

None of those sources would be surprising.

The quote above is from a sign posted in a Minnesota high school locker room in response to the rampant posting of students taking part in illegal activities online.

Some students, turning against friends, are giving coaches and teachers pictures of them in ‘compromising’ situations at drinking parties and participating in other illegal activities.

Sports scholarships have been pulled based on information coaches glean on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

In a previous post, I wrote that teens’ should make sure their online profiles are clean and scrubbed when applying to college.  As with other things, everything moves down a bit, and what teens do in high school is not exempt from a close look by interested parties.

Opportunities may be in jeopardy based on discoveries online.  Scholarships, nominations, recommendations…..all come into play mostly in the junior year of high school, but since online identities don’t disappear, it’s never too early to start thinking about this issue.

We know that checking someone out online is very tempting and all too easy.

So, for all the teens out there: think about who you are online. Does it match who you want to be? What will you need to do to make the image you want equal to the one you have?  Would you feel comfortable if a scholarship committee saw your posts? Think about the quote at the beginning of this post.

To Parents: The advice above is worth sharing with your teen as part of  a frank conversation about public and private identity, social media privacy settings, limit setting, trust and more.

Related articles

• Facebook Still Reigns Supreme With Teens, But Social Media Interest Dwindling (techcrunch.com)
• Website helps teens remove private photos from internet (updatednews.ca)