Facebook Has A Huge Impact On College Admissions [Infographic]

We knew the day would come when social media would be incorporated into… well, everything. First it was a way to connect with friends, then it became a platform for businesses worldwide to increase their reach and attract new customers. In the last couple of years, there has been a huge impact brewing that most people aren’t aware of.

Social media is nowadays incorporated into pretty much every hiring process, and if you have good skills or a strong online presence, you can pretty much score any job you would like if you have the right qualifications. Lately there is a trend where colleges increasingly use social media to affect college admissions. As you might understand, this has caused a great number of people to become concerned. That tag on Facebook of you trying out a bong as a joke suddenly isn’t so funny anymore.

These things surely should remind us all to give this our utmost attention so we can clean up our act. What you probably don’t know about this is that today (yes, this very day), more than 80% of all colleges use social media as a form of recruitment. Scary? Well, if you don’t have the most cleaned up Facebook photo gallery, maybe it’s time to clean it up to make a better impression. Even that YouTube clip isn’t too far away from being discovered.

There is a truly interesting infographic pulled together by Schools.com that might shed some further light on the matter. If you are starting to look for colleges, this will have you glued to the screen. If you’re getting worried now that your presence on some of the social networking services available on the Internet could cause your application to be denied, maybe it is good if you know that the three social networking services that colleges monitor the most are Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

So clean up your act on those ones, and you should be at least moderately good to go. However, having a few high profile connections on LinkedIn sure doesn’t hurt either. Go ahead and start your “clean up” mission because you never know when the admission officers will have a look at you. They might very well be watching you at this very moment. No pressure!