10 Facebook and Twitter Mistakes That Could Cost You Your Job

Follow these tips to avoid making embarrassing social media missteps that may hurt your career.

Protect Your Reputation

This article originally appeared on LearnVest.com.

You probably know all the ways social media can help you professionally. You can demonstrate your expertise on a topic using Twitter, network your way to a new job using LinkedIn, and keep old connections fresh on Facebook.

But social media can also have a darker side.

78% of job recruiters check search engines for background on candidates, and 63 percent check social media sites, too. So it doesn’t matter how you set your privacy settings, whether you friend your boss on Facebook, or how few followers you have: What you do on social media every day can have a very real impact on your career and your salary.

Some social media blunders aren’t so obvious, even to those of you who know your way around a hashtag. Over the past couple of years, a few snafus have gained pop culture notoriety, earning nicknames like the “Cisco Fatty” incident or spawning a whole new name for getting caught skipping work: “pulling a Facebook Fairy.”

All in all, these hilarious blunders—summarized below—make for a perfect list of what not to do on your favorite social networking site, lest it cost you your job. To help you avoid making any missteps, we talked to two social media luminaries, Shama Kabani, CEO of The Marketing Zen Group and author of “The Zen of Social Media Marketing“; and Diane Danielson, Principal Consultant with DKDNew Media Strategies and co-author of “The Savvy Gal’s Guide to Online Networking (or What Would Jane Austen Do?)”.

Read on for our slideshow of the craziest social media blunders yet—and how not to make one of your own.