Though at first blush it might seem like looking yourself up online is a recipe for feeding your ego, there are actually a lot of smart reasons that you’d want to use the latest tech to see what your online virtual presence looks like. And there are several parts of new technology that give broader power to you than before. Especially with the prevalence of social media, tagging, and face recognition, now is the time to see what you look like to the outside world.
And five reasons to use this potential would be to look at your credit, see what potential employers see, gauge your ability to get new housing, learn about cleaning your profile up, and giving your family a fighting chance to be normal if you’re any kind of a public figure.
Find Out About Bad Credit
With a few third party services in particular, you can search yourself to find out if you’ve got bad credit. There are, obviously, the major and mainstream credit searches that have always been around, but some of the new services can dig a little deeper to find out why this bad credit exists, and also what you can do about it.
See What Potential Employers See
One of the first things that potential new employers do will be to Google your name. If you test this out for yourself, you’ll get a good spectrum of information about what’s publicly available. Honestly, there’s a limited amount that you can do about the results on an immediate level, but you can at least understand what that virtual snapshot looks like.
Gauge Your Ability To Get a New House or Apartment
Another type of professional that’s going to be looking you up are the people that are going to rent you an apartment or sell you a house. If you make sure to thoroughly research yourself, you can gauge what kind of presence you have (especially on social media!) and determine if that will affect your ability to move.
Learn To Clean Up Your Virtual Profile
And there are new tools to help you clean up your virtual profile as well. This new tech gives you the opportunity to pick and choose a little bit better what parts of you show up online. This can be very important for people passing through certain stages of their lives – from college life to professional life, for instance.
Give Your Family a Fighting Chance
And finally, if you’re any kind of a public figure, you want to make sure your family stays out of your sphere to the degree they’re comfortable with. By using the latest search engine tech, you can see in which ways they’re associated with you, and you can begin to counter any kind of negative effects they might catch from your profile.