I just read a post by my friend Jay Dolan called ‘Everyone’s Workweek Sucks.’ In it, he was talking about how unprofessional he finds it when people spend their work week tweeting about how much they’re working for the weekend and dreading the start of another Monday.

I agree with him. There are several social media thought leaders that will tell you not to tweet things like this. For several reasons:

1. It’s unprofessional and your boss can see it. If he or she notices the pattern, you might be in for a meeting about your job.
2. Clients can see it. Who wants to be the client of someone who seemingly hates their job?
3. The platform you’re complaining on may be the only place some people hear from you.

There are other reasons, but I want to focus on the last one for a minute. It’s a realization I had from reading a post by Amber Naslund called ‘Social Media and Letting Off Steam.’ In this post, Amber talks about how you should be aware of how you’re coming across in individual platforms because there are people who aren’t going to follow your tweets to your blog. Or your blog to your Facebook page. Or your Facebook page to your tweets.

Some people are only going to know of you what you put up on one platform. Scary thought, huh?

I like to try and keep my platforms rounded, especially Twitter where there’s a general mix of professional and personal. But how I think I portray myself, and how I actually portray myself may be two different things. And definitely who I am on social media and who I am in real life is different, simply because of the nature of social media–I choose what goes there.

Who are you on each platform? This is probably a good time to evaluate.

Photo by m kasahara