By Sam Carnahan
Varsity Monitor
Ensuring your safety online is a critically important, but often overlooked, aspect when using social media. To further complicate things, as an athlete, you are likely faced with a unique set of issues, such as dealing with fans, friends, and sponsors trying to connect with you via social media.
Therefore, when using social media, it is critical that you understand your audience.
Understanding who is watching your social media account, and what their intentions are, is the most basic principle in protecting yourself online. Whereas most people may only have friend and family connections on social media, athletes have to deal with friends, family, former classmates, fans, rivals, coaches, scouts, and journalists. In order to protect their privacy and that of their friends and family, an athlete should do the following:
- Create a Facebook profile page, set it to private, only connect with friends and family. This will allow you to maintain a wall between your public life and your private life, while protecting the access and identities of those closest to you.
- Create a Facebook Fan page, keep it public, and use it for your professional life. This is the place to engage with fans, coaches, rivals and journalists, giving them unlimited access to your professional life, without commingling your personal life.
- Keep your Twitter profile public, but avoid disclosing personal information to friends/ family on Twitter. For example, do not message your phone number, current location, or email address to all your followers. When talking to those closest to you on Twitter, always DM (direct message).
- Avoid personally identifying photos on Instagram. It is best not to take photos of your car license plate, home address, vacation hotel, especially when the picture includes children. Never provide an opportunity for others to use social media to gain physical access to your home or family.
- Never trust anyone you do not know in real life. It is common when using social media to engage in conversation with followers you have never met, whose profiles may or may not reflect who they really are. Regardless of the nature or volume of those conversations, never disclose any personal information to anyone online that you do not know in real life. Con artists are skilled at convincing people online to trust them, and it can lead to frustration, financial loss, and public embarrassment.
Once you understand your audience and have prepared your social media accounts accordingly, you have set the right foundation for staying safe and secure online. Some additional online security tips include:
- Never share your social media password with anyone or provide them access to your accounts.
- Don’t let anyone post on your behalf.
- Maintain a security lock on your phone, in case of loss or theft.
- Use a different password for all your social media accounts (and email accounts etc.).
- Turn off location-based services and always tweet about experiences in the past tense.
- Avoid posting personal information, including license plate and phone number on social media.
- Never post “wads of cash” or other content that would encourage someone to try to gain access to your house, money, or cars. This will also create scrutiny by recruiters, scouts, compliance, and the NCAA.
- Avoid contact with agents on online. There is no reason to interact with agents until your amateur eligibility is over.
Social media is a fun and exciting way to stay in touch with friends and family, engage with fans, and showcase your personality. However, unbridled use of social media can lead to security issues, such as identity theft, in-person confrontations, and robberies, affecting both you and your friends and family.
By understanding your audience and following some basic online security tips, you can enjoy all the social media benefits while maintaining personal privacy for you and your family and friends.