5 Ways to Optimize Your Online Presence Before Submitting Applications

You’ve filled out your entire application, perfected your essays, secured killer recommendations, and written a CV that truly shows off your skills and experiences. You’re ready to submit, right?

WRONG! There’s one more thing you need to do, and you should do it NOW, before the adcoms start googling.

Optimize your online presence.

Here are 5 things ways to do it:

1. Google yourself

If you want to see what they’ll see, start with a simple Google search for your name. Once you see where you have a presence and where you don’t, then you can continue to the next few steps here.

2. Clean up your act

Your entire application could be 100%, but if the adcoms see your Facebook or Instagram littered with inappropriate pictures, your Twitter feed overflowing with obscenities, and that blog post where you rant about items that should never have seen the light of day, much less been published for the world to see, that 720 GMAT score (or other perfect or near-perfect score) might get overlooked.

Keep questionable content private; or better yet, delete it all. (After all, is anything online ever really private?)

3. Get social

Lest you think that we think that social media is bad, our next piece of advice here is that you MAKE SURE that you have your social media bases covered. Any tech-savvy, modern applicant should have a LinkedIn account, and having other social accounts like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are totally acceptable (though not needed professionally).

While you don’t want to get in trouble for overusing and oversharing (see #2), you also don’t want to appear like a caveman totally out of the social media world.

4. Become more findable

You can optimize other people’s search results for your name by doing a number of quick fixes: First, you can buy your domain name – pick a URL with your name in it and use that site to keep all your social info in one place (i.e. links to your social media profiles on other sites). You can also use About.Me, WordPress, and Tumblr to consolidate your social presence and make yourself easily searchable. Also, by claiming vanity URLs for your social profiles (setting up /yourname at the end of a link), you can make profile sharing easier and further optimize your online presence (here’s how you do this on LinkedIn).

5. Make what’s found reflect well on you

It doesn’t have to be boring or overly professional. You can have passions and other interests. You can even have political opinions or religious beliefs. That’s all fine. Even good. But if you have a few posts, pics, tweets, or status updates that don’t reflect well on you and that you can’t get rid of, post new, positive material to push the old stuff down the rankings. Maybe you can’t make it disappear, but you can make it less prominent.

So clean up what you can, replace what you can’t, and make your social media presence a plus if an admissions officer decides to google you (which they most likely will do!).

Still not ready to click “Submit”? Don’t push that button until you’re confident that you’re presenting the best application possible! Get in touch with us so we can help.

Related Resources:

• The Quick Guide to Admissions Resumes
• Can You Get Accepted After Doing Something Stupid?
• Will Facebook Destroy Your Admissions Chances?

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