Clean Your Twitter Before a Promotion or Leadership Role
Public-facing roles come with a search of your name. What to clear before the promotion rather than after it.
Set the Standard First
Prior to stepping foot in a promotion conversation, or submitting your name for leadership position, get rid of the tweets that would raise eyebrows. One casual accusation against an ex-boss or one lame joke sent in a screen capture will get you the job. Decision makers will Googles your Twitter handle just like they scan your LinkedIn. You validated their claims of a need, are giving them more reasons NOT to say no. Do not give them one. Perform a date-range deletion of Tweets beyond three years old, looking for keywords "hate," "stupid," "boss" and "drunk" that such poorly rank in the professional environment. Cleaning before the offer letter is written.
Once you promote after that, any deletion appears like cover up And a journalist (or a board member) is going to interpret this as mass retirement at the end of your golden parachute, and you know that. You do the work now, when your history is little more than a mundane archive you are only adding to. You will be conditioned to have a clean timeline as the bare minimum for your leadership role. A tweet from back in 2019 that was problematic cannot be fixed in retrospect once you begin interviewing candidates. TweetSweep also works if you want to filter by date and keyword so that you can mass delete the worst stuff in one go without having to scroll through years of posts manually.
Review Against Executive Standards
A tweet about a late meeting or poor server is sort of normal when you are junior. As an executive, that same tweet would then indicate bad judgment. You have a standard as soon as you climb up. Remove anything that reads to them as personal grievance or political rant, or inside joke about employer. This entails deleting tweets about alcohol, sarcasm about work culture or bits of casual swearing. Audit your timeline against the question: would I want a board member to read this out loud in a meeting? If your answer is no, delete it.
Company values are even more important at the leadership level. When your organization publishes a list of values about respect, inclusion or professionalism, your tweets should not undermine those values. The values you violate with that tweet, mocking a customer, taking a grotesque swipe at the competition, or joking inappropriately about an immutable trait of a protected group are valid regardless of when you post it. Using TweetSweep, you can run a scan of your entire history for phrases that are at odds with the principles published by your company. Getting rid of old material that no longer fits the new you is not rewriting history. It is aligning your public footprint with the job you have right now.
Remove Personal Oversharing
What executives say, when they gave their resignation is not subject to the same bounds of privacy as individual contributors. A tweet about a medical issue, relationship problem, or financial struggle that seemed like catharsis four years ago now becomes baggage when you run a team or well known brand. Those details of course are the impression that employees and investors will have with respect to you. You are not, however, as per your Q3 earnings call and all-hands notes: get rid of any tweet that discloses personal matters. The rule of thumb is that if it is private, then it does not belong on a leadership timeline.
Ultimately, Even good oversharing can do harm. The flaunting of vacations while a company is going through layoffs and YOY complains, or showing off a new car while the team battles with budget crises — it all reeks of tone deafness. Most visible personal posts are the ones that were best spread, so filter by retweets or likes. Take them out before the promotion goes into effect. Your real life can be off-line still, but your professional Twitter should be a resource for people in your industry and not a place to sound out your personal thoughts.
Target High-Risk Political Content
Tweeting politically is to leaders what playing with fire is: it carries an oversized risk. For instance, you may have retweeted a polarising figure, hopped on the bandwagon of a controversial hashtag or posted a sarcastic comment about policy – all three can potentially come back to hunt you years later and are also relatively easy to find. Your views on a political tweet could not have changed, but the context around it shifts once you find yourself in a more prominent position. As an executive, what seemed like free expression as an individual contributor becomes fodder for a news item. For tweeted articles expressing a political view, particularly ones that make a strong case against an individual or group, for tweets that attack others and those using incendiary language.
The safest approach is to avoid anything political that does not directly relate to the focus of your industry or company mission. It is easy to make a case for a tech leader tweeting about the regulation of the internet. What a tech tycoon tweeting about a candidate's personal life is not. Using TweetSweep you can search through your entire timeline on political keywords/hashtags. If you have been particularly active during a contentious election cycle, run the handful of deletions in bulk by date range instead. Never leave a solitary political post out there that could be portrayed to come back nipping in some article or boardroom discussion.
Delete Mentions of Former Employers
One could even understand the tone — tweets mentioning former companies, bosses or coworkers are frequently in early career timelines (and can be awkward at that) but when you are being considered for a lead role this is unacceptable. Complaining about a prior boss, cracking a joke about the startup you just left with, or bragging about how you are leaving a competitor all reflect bad judgement. Executives are guided to keep relationships professional and avoid publicly criticizing their previous employers. So how would you do this? — Delete all tweets where it mentions the name of a former company in either a disparaging, mocking, or gossip context. In fact, even neutral mentions can be misinterpreted if they happen at the wrong time.
At the other end of the spectrum are positive mentions of previous employers which can lead a company into difficulties if they lend themselves to within-internal-strategy or trade secrets. For instance: A tweet announcing a product launch timeline, or a funding round or an internal policy from within the company in which you used to work may amount to breach of confidentiality. Filter by the names of every company you have ever worked at and go through each match. Remove anything that could have been seen as leaking sensitive information or venting frustration. It should show that you exited each position with your professionalism intact and your ability to exercise discretion at a full gallop.
Shape Your Executive Persona
Hopefully, your timeline without the awful tweets will be more reflective of the kind of leader you are becoming. The executive Twitter presence is vastly made up of thought leadership, commentary on the state of the sector and professional musings. Your personal content should only be limited to positive, low-risk material that can humanize you without compromising yourself. You now have one tweet there: Maybe a charity run not far away or something about the book you read. Not a tweet about a family conflict or some sort of health scare. Look at each remaining post, and check if it helps you professionally or works against your brand.
Archive Tweets to Keep for Yourself Use TweetSweep to quickly archive Tweets that you may want or need at the future before wiping them from the public timeline. That way you can retain the data but not keep the post live. Then schedule frequent cleanups. You out an email to yourself on every quarter reminding yourself to do a quarterly sweep of the previous quarter's tweets, keeping your timeline clean and preventing a huge purge later. Your presence on Twitter should grow as your role expands. Having a clean history enables you to tweet tactically about your industry without the pressure of being tracked down by a reporter or board member from five years ago.