Good Online Reputation Vital to College Admission

My daughter is a junior in high school. What more is involved nowadays in being admitted to college than getting good grades? -- Want to Know
Answer: Good grades do matter a lot, so does involvement at a high level in extra-curricular activities. The star quarterback and the winning debater often have a leg up in the admissions process. So do the exceptional artist and musician. You may be surprised, however, to learn that there is a new factor in the admissions process. Nowadays, your child's online reputation can be a factor in whether he or she is accepted.
A recent survey by Kaplan found that 24 percent of college admissions officers reported visiting applicants' social media pages, while 20 percent Googled them to learn more. What's even more striking, 12 percent said what they found online negatively impacted the candidates' admissions chances. For business school and law school admissions officers, these numbers are even higher.
How can you help your daughter make sure she is putting her best foot forward online? Here are some key tips for managing an online footprint:
1. Search yourself or have your teen search her name on Google, Yahoo and other search engines. See what comes up. You can't clean up an online reputation if you don't know what's out there.
2. You also can protect your child's reputation, privacy and safety with a fee service like SafetyWeb, which will give you automated parental alerts for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and mobile phones.
3. Make sure your child's social media accounts are set to private, and limit public searchability settings.
4. Encourage your teenager to keep her profile photo appropriate. Even if her accounts are set to private (and only friends can see her posts and pictures), names and profile photos are often still visible to the world. Make sure that her key picture is an image she wants to present to a college.
5. When applying to college, your daughter should remove past posts from public view. This is also a good time to clean up previous postings and make sure all social media accounts have only current and appropriate messaging.
6. Take control of tagging! Your teenager's posts may be appropriate, but what are her friends saying about them? Facebook's default settings allow friends to tag your teen in their photos, profile posts and even check them into places. You can adjust these settings to be more private.
7. Encourage your child to be smart and think about everything she posts online before she does it. Teach her that the Internet has a long memory. After all her hard work, you wouldn't want an inappropriate Facebook photo or offensive tweet to keep her out of a top school!
Forming good online habits is essential not only for college admission, but also for job applications. This habit needs to start early and become ingrained in your child. On safetyweb.com, your daughter should read the reputation guide for college-bound students to help her use online media appropriately.