SWOT Analysis: A Personal Look at Your Online Self

            Recently, I came across an article which discussed how to evaluate yourself by using the SWOT analysis tool. This article immediately had me evaluating myself as a student, employee, friend, and overall person. This is so important to do if you want to understand yourself a little better in any given situation. Seeing a list of your weaknesses is definitely humbling, but it’s crucial in order to improve yourself.

Soon after, I found a SWOT analysis on social media as a whole. This quickly filled my head with ideas of the impacts of social media on organizations. Eventually, however, I started comparing and contrasting the social media analysis along with the self evaluating analysis, and discovered what I will call the Personal Social Media SWOT Analysis.

Think how beneficial this would be for us if we conducted a SWOT analysis for every personal social media account we had. I mean people always say that whatever you put on the internet will stay there forever, and that’s true. If we conducted our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts as if we truly believed that, then we would not be caught off guard when future employers, co-workers, friends, etc. view these pages. Don’t we want to be showing the world our best selves? So should we wanting to show the online world the same thing? If we broke down our accounts and really analyzed the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, how much better off would our social media footprint be?

I believe that social media is a huge means of communication in our world today, and so it is vital for our social media accounts to truly show who we are and what we represent. I don’t mean you should go out and lie about who you are, but just analyze and see if you are showing off your strengths so that you can have opportunities arise through your social media networks. I mean, after all, we’re great people - we just need to show the online world that as well.

Here's a link to the articles I mentioned above:

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_05_1.htm

http://anikocommunication.wordpress.com/swot-analysis-for-twitter/