Across the six largest social media networks, more than two billion people around the world are members of the sites, according to MediaBistro. A vast majority of those users are more than likely to visit their preferred sites almost daily. With such frequent uses of the sites, there’s no question that they can be helpful in job searching, especially by using LinkedIn. However, your social profiles could be the reason you don’t land a job.

Keep things professional

One major setback that job seekers who use social media find themselves falling victim to in the job search is that their pages raise red flags because of questionable content, The Huffington Post found. To prevent anything – an errant picture from a wild night, a Facebook status that has foul language – from representing a roadblock in your job search, you should make sure your public behavior is at its best. If you post personal information and statuses, you’ll want to put privacy settings into place and clean up any public-facing pictures to make sure nothing embarrassing can pop up. Once that’s done, make sure your conduct remains as clean as possible. Recruiters are turned off by the use of profanity, any grammatical or punctuation errors, and offensive comments. Representing yourself poorly on social media recruiter think of you in a negative light, in some cases indicating that you have a bad character or a complete lack of judgment.

How to give your sites a scrub

When you’re trying to improve your online process, you’ll want to do more than just make everything private. It’s often recommended that you take a close examination of your social media profiles and clean them up to align better with your intended brand. By examining your current output and looking at anything that seems off-target with what you want your profiles to say, you can remove anything that seems like it will give a negative perception. In doing this “social audit,” you’ll also be able to make sure that your profiles match up with one another. If your Twitter account is at least semi-professional, but your Instagram account is full of party pictures or jokes that detract from your image, cleaning them both might be the right idea.

You might also want to consider joining new social networks or experimenting with new strategies if your accounts are flagging. Sites like Tumblr are up-and-coming with plenty of room for growth or brand identity improvements. If that seems too difficult to you, try joining a group meant for people in your industry, or send out more tweets using current hashtags, and you’ll likely find yourself gaining more attention from people than you might expect otherwise.

Love social media? Focus on LinkedIn

If you’re a huge social media fan, you might want to focus your efforts on LinkedIn, The Huffington Post added. Up to 94 percent of recruiters are active on the site, and it’s considered the best place on the Internet to find and vet potential candidates. If you have up-to-date and relevant posts and information on your page, you’re in good shape. You’ll want to make frequent updates and have a high-quality profile photo as well, as both of those qualities can have positive effects on your profile’s overall visibility.