If you’ve been online for a while, you’ve probably said some pretty silly stuff. We all have! You’ve definitely seen other influencers having old posts brought up from their social media history when they were younger and less knowledgable – but who has the time to go through all of your tweets or even know what to look for?
It takes years to build a reputation and a single post to ruin it
Vanilla is a service which will scan your Twitter account for tweets that match a set list of words and show them to you, before allowing you to choose whether to delete them all or if there are any you want to keep.
We’re living in a time of hypersensitivity and everything you’ve ever posted online is available for anyone to dig up.
Your words carry weight and your brand is your currency. Preserve it by regularly auditing your social history.
(for what it’s worth, we disagree with the sentiment that this is a time of hypersensitivity – it’s more that we’re able to hear the different points of view easier and learn about how others find certain words and phrases offensive. Once you know that a word or phrase is offensive to others, it just makes sense to try to find ways to remove it from your vocabulary)
We tested out the free plan first which scans 1000 tweets, and that brought up some interesting posts (basically any time you use a swear word which on a personal account was…a lot) but it was enough to convince us to purchase the paid option (as of time of purchase and writing, this was £19 for a one time scan)
You go into Twitter and download your archive then upload the files into the Vanilla site (depending on how many tweets you’ve got in your history, you may have a few files that can be uploaded . Vanilla will then scan your archive files and pull up any tweets that match their list of words to look for – you can also add your own words in if there are certain words that you know you’ve used in the past but that might not get picked up.
There were a few bugs with the archive files that we were using but once we figured it out (with help from Samuel, the creator – he was so quick and friendly to respond!) then it was so easy to get rid of anything that could be taken the wrong way out of context.
Vanilla is a great service to sign up to if you want to make sure that everything that you’ve got out there on your Twitter account really reflects your current thoughts. £19 is a small amount to pay when you consider people have lost out of work and jobs because of something they said years ago.
