I know what you did last night only because there are 60 pictures of you on Facebook that your friend took of you doing body shots at the bar, running down the street on your way home, and then jamming pizza down your throat at 3 AM. Yepp, we’ve all been there…and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

But, when you’re coming up on graduation and moving into “the real world” it’s time to take a second look at your online presence and especially your Facebook profile. There’s all kinds of stories out there of people getting fired because of their Facebook profile page, the pictures they are “tagged” in or what’s posted on their wall, so you need to be careful and thoughtful of what goes on.

I’ve mentioned it before on Dorm Room Biz and also been quoted in the New York Times about how students more and more are “detagging” or “untagging” themselves from pictures on Facebook that a friend might have put up after a party.

Properly managing your online profiles is an important step that you need to take seriously when you are about to graduate and here are some tips to help you along the way.

• Detag your pictures – go through your pictures and detag anything that looks like it could be derogatory or incriminating when you go for a job interview or even for when you are working and someone at your company comes across your profile. This is a step you’d want to take sooner than later so that your profile can clear out of these pictures, also consider deleting wall posts that may have curse words or other bad comments.
• Put up a nice, clean picture – Your profile picture is the first thing someone will see of you when they search your name or come across you profile, so you want to make sure it is a good picture and is “clean”. You don’t want your boss coming across a picture of you straddling a guy at a party while wearing a skimpy outfit and drinking do you? I didn’t think so.
• Change your privacy settings!!! This is probably the most important and easiest thing you can do to protect yourself from being caught up in any issues. Change them to the highest settings they can go so that your profile is very limited or not even available to someone who searches for you. I’ll do a follow up post on how to change your security/privacy settings to help keep people out of your profile that you don’t want to see it.
• Join related groups and conversations – We’ve all see the groups for friends who lost their cell phones while drunk and now need your phone number or the ones for beer pong champs or for a keg stand club. Remove yourself from these groups and join ones related to your industry, the line of work your trying to get into, and your related interests. Then, go a step further and join the conversations within those groups and fan pages.
• Maintain it – a big part of cleaning up your profile and appearance on Facebook is just maintaining it after you have started clearing it out. As more events happen or people write on your wall, just be mindful of what the picture is of or what someone wrote. If you think it could cause you an issue in the future then delete it. It’s easier to maintain your Facebook profile then to deal with getting fired from a job and having to look for a new one.