How To Keep Your Gymnast Safe on Social Media
Social media is a popular platform for gymnastics brands to share their products and for gymnasts to share their skills and leotard collections. It’s super fun to post a video of your gymnast performing a newly-mastered skill, or to share a photo posing in the new leotard you just got!
However, it’s important to remember that practically anyone can access the Internet and social media sites, and it’s possible for others online to use your online information and photos in an unsafe way.
We here at Snowflake Designs monitor our social media sites carefully, making sure to block accounts following us that we find unkind or unsafe and limiting the personal information we put out about our Snowflake ambassadors and other gymnasts who invite us to share their posts. With that in mind, here are some tips from us that you can use to keep yourself and your gymnast safe online!
Watch Who is Following You
If you do not have your social media accounts set to “Private”, anyone on the Internet with a social media account can see what you post and can follow your page. This can include spam accounts as well as stalkers and other potentially dangerous people.
To be safe, either set your social media accounts to “Private”, or monitor your current and new followers closely if you want to keep your account accessible to the public. Watch out for accounts with no profile picture or a strange or inappropriate profile picture, strange or spam-like usernames, off-putting profile bios, and spam or inappropriate photos or posts. If the suspicious account is a “Public” account, also check what other accounts or hashtags they are following.
Keep Private Information to Yourself
If your account is “Public”, anyone can see what information you post on social media. This means that anything you post about you or your gymnast’s name, school, teacher, gym, age, birthday, place of residence (whether that is a state, town, street, or full address), or anything else can be seen by just about anyone online. This information could be used by dangerous people to find or stalk you or your gymnast, so it’s best to keep that information off of the Internet.
You can do this by refraining from posting about those details, or by cropping out or blurring areas of photos that contain street signs, home addresses, license plate numbers, school and gym names, and other details.
If you must share these or other details with someone online (if you’re buying from a shop and need an item shipped to you, for example), communicate through direct messages with an account and person you trust rather than posting sensitive information in the comments of a post.
Those are a few of our Internet safety tips! We strongly encourage keeping these things in mind when running a social media account for you or your gymnast.
Speaking of which, keep an eye out on our social media and our blog if you run a gymnastics social media account, since we will be adding to our ambassador program in a couple of months!
Do you have any Internet safety tips that you would like to share? Tell us in the comments below!
